Sarah- TP11

I met with Shivani last night for our last bloggable tutoring sessions. We have agreed to keep meeting once a week however, until I move in August.

Before we got down to tutoring, I asked her how her last two weeks were (we didn't meet last week due to severe weather conditions and the ensuing laziness). I usually ask how her week was, but don't get too much response, or there just isn't much going on in her week or mine, but this time we had twice the material to talk about, and with the crazy weather etc, a more interesting conversation. I noticed her communication skills have gotten a lot better even since the last time I met with her. They seem to increase every week, and now her progress is truly noticable. We talked about how she has gotten to practice, and how working with the customers in her in-laws store has really helped her with small talk and basic conversation. She admits that sometimes she doesn't understand what they are asking and has to advise them to "direct their questions to her father-in-law". After a lot more talking than usual, (which was fun and insightful!)we got down to business.

I am trying to make it more fun for her, as I know that the sessions are exhausting for, and she is not used to school settings. So I brought in a few puzzle type practice sheets this time. The first was a crossword puzzle with colors to fill in the blanks. She knows her colors well, and so the clues just helped with her vocabulary, and it was good practice spelling, and using her brain in a new way! After she figured out how a crossword puzzle worked, she seemed to enjoy it and jumped ahead of me if I tried to help her, which was great! The only color she had trouble spelling was orange, understandably. Although she did keep trying to put a "g" in front of yellow, I'm not really sure where that came from. At the end she looked at me and said, "Pink!" I uunderstood that she was wondering why they didn't use that color, so I added a few boxes, had her write "P I N K" in them, and make up her own clue. She said, "This is your favorite color." Crossword puzzle was a success.

We then did a sentence completion sheet with questions like "Tennis is a ______". This was good again for vocabulary practice, and I again made her copy the word into the blank for practice spelling. She did really well on this, and knew most of the answers. We moved onto the last passage of level two of the reading comprehension sheets I have been bringing in. She did a great job on this as well, which makes me super proud because only a few weeks ago, we started with level one, and she did definitely have some difficulty. (You may have read my extremely frustrated posts around that time).

We took a break at this point, as we had reached 59 minutes. I pointed out that everything was easy for her today, and she seemed really happy about this. :) I think I underestimated how much she could improve in two weeks!

To be Continued.....