Meagan TP#12

We spent our last two sessions last week, Tuesday and Wednesday, finishing Zhang's summer assignments. For her reading assignment, the second part was to create a visual depiction of a scene from the book, so we made a nice drawing of the main characters, Jake and his grandfather Billy, rebuilding Billy's beloved sod house on Billy's huge farm.  Then, I reviewed and corrected Zhang's spelling assignment in which she decided to write a story incorporating the new vocabulary she learned from her summer reading book and/or other reading sources.  She made common mistakes with tense and having a few letters in the wrong place, so we re-wrote the misspelled words a couple times and made example sentences with the words in each of the basic tenses. That way, Zhang could see how and when the words are conjugated in order to effectively make the correct statement.

On our last day, Wednesday, we went to a film screening of The Lorax in the down town park with Zhang Li's parents and my family.  Never seeing the film before, Zhang was captivated as soon as it began.  Every now and then the plot would confuse her and she would pose a question to me in English or her parents in Chinese, but she was able to comprehend most of the film and even noting some contextual clues that emphasized how disastrous stripping a land of its natural resources can be.  For example, she mentioned how unusual it was that the land of Thneed-ville was completely artificial, and that the female love-interest, Audrey, never even seen a real tree before.  By the end of the movie, she had formed a complete opinion and shared that it is important to balance our actions with the earth, as we may take too much from it and hurt it in return.  At the end of the night, I gave Zhang a small gift (a jade bracelet from a local Chinese jewelry store) and a guide to fourth grade grammar to prepare her for the new year.  We promised to contact via Skype anytime she needed help or a friend to talk to!