Sally
My tutoring partner is going to be in the sixth grade in the
fall and her English name is Sally. She was really shy at first but towards the
end of the session she started opening up more. For a warm-up activity I did a
Mad-Lib that was a letter from summer camp. I did this to see what parts of
speech she knew and usually they are pretty funny. She asked me for examples of
adjectives and what an adverb was but after brief examples she could write one
down so I think she knows what they are and just needed reminding. After the Mad-Lib
I played a song from a website called Flocabulary. It introduced 10 words and
she said she knew one of them before we began.
The website had worksheets which I helped her fill out. I
explained the definition of each word with examples and then I would ask her
for examples. She did really well and by the end she knew all of the words.
Lastly, I had small squares with letters on them and I would give her a word
scrambled up. I read the definition and she would spell the word. I felt that
in a way the lesson was good because I know that she really learned nine new
words such as intense, convert, and sparse. The problem was that the lesson was
not fun, at all…
She is a very serious student. She takes her time writing
each letter perfectly and even when there was chaos around us in the library she
never even looked up from the paper. Her focusing was not the problem. It is me
that needs to come up with another lesson in which she can learn just as much,
while doing something more fun and interactive.
It's great that she's able to concentrate the whole time. Mad Libs sound like a great idea. Maybe at her age, Scrabble could be good practice as well...?
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