Sarah- TP12

Holiday shenanigans have interrupted my blogging but here's the last tutoring blog continued from TP-11:
Second hour of tutoring with Shivani.

After returning from our break, We dove back into another sentence completion worksheet.
Italy is a _____
a. city
b. sport
c. country
d. animal
She did pretty well again, and really only had problems with the American cities like L.A. It would be hard to have to recognize a whole new set of city names! This question on Italy (there was also one about Paris) sparked a conversation about where we had been and wanted to go. I knew she had only really been to Atlanta, Orlando, and Tallahassee, and her own home country of India, but she knew all about Italy and how beautiful it is, and said she really wants to go someday. The Paris question merited an almost identical response. She couldn't believe I had been to both places already. Really reminds me how blessed I have been!

We moved onto a spelling by picture game / worksheet. This one, as you could guess, had pictures of animals, and the word next to the picture with only a few letters filled into the blanks. These spelling practice sheets are useful for Shivani, I think, because as she sounds out words, she often lumps a bunch of sounds together, or adds her own. For example, if she sees the word "fantastic", she will start the sounding out process correctly with "fa... fa" but seems to immeditely give up and guess "family! farm!" Sometimes she will even use the last letter first, and guess something like "carefull". One of the kids I used to tutor did the same thing as she learned to read. She would try to sound it out, and because "c" was the last sound she heard in her head, would always guess a word beginning with that sound. I find it extremely interesting that Shivani occasionally does the same thing.  Anyway, I figured that slowing down and remembering how our lettering system works could be a useful building block to sounding words out. I think this is a useful activity that I will continue to use with her.

The rest of the session was pretty uneventful. We did one more spell by picture page, that had driving related words and was a little harder. Once we figured out together what the word was, she did a pretty good job sounding out and inserting the missing letters. I was embarrassed to find out that I wasn't sure which order the C and S came in "license" (And even as I type it now, I have to make sure I'm doing it the right way!)

We finished with one of her reading comprehension worksheets. She has run out of level 2 worksheets, and has been doing really well on them (see TP11) so I gave her the first one from Level 3. We both agreed that this was a little too difficult though, so we're going to back up for the next lesson.