Meagan TP#3

The second session with Jeffrey was Friday, July 27th.  Here the focus of the session and our future sessions is primarily on speaking and reading, with at least ten minutes of writing practice.  In order to track his progress, I keep a small log of our discussion topics, books read and checked out, and how many sentences he could read and words he could spell.

For that week, the theme stayed on super heroes, so Jeffrey and I spent  a good ten minutes talking about his favorite hero (Iron Man) and how he is usually Iron Man when he plays super/action heroes with his friends at school.  I asked his Mom to bring his toys as well for that day, to help him have fun practicing new verbs and gerunds.  He brought his racing cars and I learned that is another favorite topic of his as well.  He made some grammatical errors when describing his success at winning a car race at school the previous day (i.e. "I won the racing at school."), but I helped him with stating the correct tense for the word race and to add "ed" for past tense.  Plus, I introduced new words pertaining to cars for him to practice: driving, stopping, going, opening (the door), closing (the door), and speeding.  I modeled the words for him by playing with him and moving the cars to show stopping/going, opening the doors to show getting in/out of the car, and racing the cars to show driving/speeding.  We even had fun trying to guess the models of each racing car.  

Our reading lesson was a book called Swing!  and it fit perfectly with our discussion, as it entailed different scanimations (reflective images) of kids playing various sports and the verbs describing them (i.e. "Can you shoot a basketball?) It is a beginner's book with simple sentences in bold, colorful letters. Spending about twenty minutes, Jeffrey was able to read at least five sentences (with a sentence on each page) with help on pronunciation. He has a lot of trouble remembering the sounds each letter makes, so we usually sound it out (Tah for "T", Puh for "P") in order for him to successfully read and understand the word.  

The following writing lesson were a couple print outs of the letters he has trouble with with images as examples for the correct pronunciation.  That day he had, "I", "P", and "T" and he was able to trace each letter and make one example.  At the end of our session, he checked out a Batman book for his Dad to help him read.