Sarah- TP8

... continued from TP7

After Shivani and I took a break, we began our second hour of tutoring. I started by quizzing her on the road signs we had practiced in the first hour. As we went through the signs, I made two different piles: the ones she knew immediately, and the ones she didn't know, struggled to remember, or got wrong. I also explained the hard ones after she got them wrong. When we went through the whole pile, we did the difficult ones again. She was able to remember all of them. I taught her one way street, made her explain it back to me as best she could, and had her add it to her running vocabulary list. I want her to be able to produce the term "one way street" when she sees a "WRONG WAY" sign or a "Do Not Enter" sign, so that she really understands what it means. If she's really going to be driving on our roads, she needs to know this! I also had to explain things like why "PED XING" really means people are walking across the street. The first thing she does when I pull out a sign is sound out the words, and "ped exeng" means nothing.

After the quizzes on road signs, we got the book "Which Animal is That?" We read this book last Monday as well, but took a different approach this time. The book has a small image either cut off or not fully drawn, of an piece of an animal. Then there is a small description about the animal: "I have six legs, I drink nectar from flowers, I can fly and walk, but I cannot swim underwater." Then the next page has the full picture and the caption, "I am a butterfly!" 

Last time we read this book, I had her try to guess as she went along what the animal was. Sometimes she got it correct, and sometimes she almost did. (she guessed snake instead of earthworm once because of the description that it crawls through the dirt on its belly.) This time however, we looked at the animal first. Then I had her read the description and allowed her brain to come full circle with how the description matches the animal she now knows. I feel that, knowing its a butterfly already, we could read some of the harder sentences like "I have three body parts, a head, thorax, and... " (IDK what a butterfly butt is called) and try to figure out, and understand what this means. It was a different take on the same book, and I think it worked well, as the content wasn't brand new, and some of the variables were therefore reduced. 

Last, we did one more of the level two comprehension work sheets that I have been giving her. This is the second she's had to do, and she asked for two instead of one for homework! We stopped at the end of each paragraph, which was really only three extremely repetitive sentences long, and I had her try to explain it to me. THEN she was allowed to answer the questions. I think this helped a lot, as it forced her to read for content, and not completion. She still struggled a bit with the questions, but she is at least thinking on her own, and understanding that she has to try to find the answers in the passage. 

To conclude, I reminded her that she is supposed to commit the new vocabulary words to memory this week, and I told her that I think she is getting a lot better and she must be practicing out of class. She was very grateful for my comment and agreed that she had been practicing.