Tutoring report.
I tutored the 2 new boys yesterday. I'm not tutoring the original kids this week because the boy had his tonsils out on Tuesday. But the girl and her mom were visiting the 2 new boys when I arrived to tutor.
First the older one. That's simple. The older one always goes first, so there's no argument like with the other kids. He did his fill-in-the-blanks and a sheet on comparatives and superlatives (big/bigger/biggest). Neither boy wrote what I asked, though the older one tried. I could tell he copied something, since the vocab wasn't what he would use. In fact, I bet he didn't even know what some of the words meant. I told him I want him to write without looking at anything. He said it's hard, but I reminded him that he's quite chatty, lots of words when we're together, so all those words can just be written down. I said the writing can be about anything, just pretend he's talking to me and write it down. Let's see what he has tomorrow.
Then we read the end of the book on Bugatti cars. I am already learning more about race cars than I ever thought existed. The boy gets so excited over things like a 250 liter engine (making that number up) and all those specs that go right over my head! I was more interested in the fact that one of the Bugatti family died testing one of their cars, just like Bruce McLaren, who I researched for the boy but we haven't gotten to read yet. It seems designing and testing cars at high speeds is not a safe occupation! Also the original Mr. Bugatti (his name begins with an E, but I forget it now) also designed high-speed trains. OK, you can see that I'm taking in more info on this subject than I ever thought of. The boy's obsession with race cars parallels my own with horses at about that age, so I'm certainly sympathetic, and I probably bored people to tears with exciting (to me) trivia about horses. This is my karma coming back to bite me.
Then the younger boy. He's distressed that the fill-in-the-blanks sheets are piling up faster than we can do them. I told him not to worry about it, we'd just do 2 each time, but I can tell having stuff left over bothers him. He is very diligent and works hard, but I get a weird feeling he's just humoring us all. It's as if he's an old soul and realizes all this fuss over learning English is just a momentary blip in the huge scheme of things. Still, he plays the game very well, trying extra hard to be a good student.
He didn't write anything. He is at a loss because he doesn't know how to spell stuff. I told him to just sound it out and do the best he can. We practiced with the word "story." He sounded it out and got "store," which I said is close enough that we'd be able to figure out what he meant. It's a real hump to get kids over having to do everything right to get them to just create, and not worry about mistakes.
We did work sheets on contractions, and then I said our lesson was over, but he asked for just 2 more sheets to do, so I agreed. We had hardly started when he said he had to go to the bathroom. He was gone a long time. I think he didn't really want to do those last 2 sheets and was hiding out. So why did he ask to do them? We'll have to discuss this tomorrow. He did the same thing before. If he doesn't want to do them, then he shouldn't ask for them.
[/URL]
[/URL]
Viewing these pictures and reading the descriptions, I am ever so grateful that rain is abundant here and the soil is able to retain it!! 
