An abbreviated tutoring report.
The 3 kids from the one family were sick, so I only tutored the new girl today. I bet it's that cold I'm hoping I don't get. Last time the original girl was sniffing, and I suggested to her that she blow her nose. She didn't want to. No one in that family knows how or wants to learn. The new girl, however, will blow her nose w/o being asked, so this is not necessarily a Chinese thing.
Anyway, with the new girl, last time, we started to read Curious George, which is the perfect reading level for her. I'd like to find more classic stories of that kind. Any suggestions? I thought maybe we'd finish it today, but she petered out before we got to the end, and she suggested we stop. I had just started to realize that she was failing, and I appreciate her self-knowledge that she can tell when she should stop. Many kids her age or even older don't have that perception. The more I see of her, the more I appreciate certain qualities and tell her so. She is very quick to pick up concepts, generally, though she still has problems knowing that verbs are not "I" or "you." That's because I give the kids sheets conjugating the verbs in past, present, and future for certain crucial verbs like "to be" and "to have." Today, she had real problems on a verb grammar worksheet. She was supposed to translate some simple sentences from present to past and from past to present. They were fairly simple sentences, but she got mixed up about "I ride my bike." She started thinking "I am riding my bike," and things like that. I kept asking her to imagine that she did it yesterday and tell me what she did. Finally, she said, "I rode my bike." It's an irregular verb, and she didn't know that kind of stuff, but her language skills are so far ahead of her grammar that she figured it out.
Not so the other kids at her stage! I think their speaking was more in line with their reading and understanding, but she is very adept at speaking. In fact, last lesson I asked who had taught her, thinking this was more than what you'd pick up in school. She said nobody had, and I think she learned just like the oder boy and his younger sister. But she is really talented, apparently, in getting correct pronunciation and learning vocabulary. Of course I told her how talented she is at this. Kids
thrive on being good at things and wilt if they think they are hopeless. I have to constantly pick at all the mistakes they make and correct them, so when they do well, I want to be sure to praise them.
Lately, the first girl and her older brother are doing very well at composing writing. They don't have the grammar and punctuation down yet, but they are getting good at being creative in their writing, which I praise, meanwhile, telling them their technical faults.
I keep saying how making mistakes is a good thing. It tells me what I still have to teach them so they can improve. I pick out the mistakes, but I don't want to get too heavy-handed about them. When the first kids started, they thought making a mistake was a sin. Now they have learned that everyone makes mistakes, even me. They find typos in my worksheets, etc. I shrug and correct it and apologize, but I don't act like it's the end of the world. So they have relaxed about their errors, too.
I print out a lot of stuff from the Internet that someone else has composed, and I find mistakes there, too. Once recently, I asked the original girl to read something about Hershey's chocolates and Hershey, PA. In one place, they spelled it Hersey. I didn't correct it but put a note at the top of the page that if she found the typo, she would get an extra stone (remember the stones?). She didn't find it, but she gave it a valiant try. So even typos can be a teaching experience.
I really am enthused about my new career. I thank the fates for bringing it my way.
