The latest with the tutoring kids:
I started out with the littlest boy. As I planned, we did some simple description. I told him to choose a toy, and then we described it, mainly what colors it had, but I worked on it this way. He had a train so I said, "What is it?" And he said, "A train." So I pointed to it and said, "This is a train." I asked him to repeat it. Then we identified colors. "What color are the wheels?" They were green, so I wanted him to say, "The wheels are green." We got doing that a bit, but I could see he was getting bored with it, so we went back to the table to do some writing. He is still learning his right from his left and how to read "right" and "left" and identify pictures that are on the right or the left. My big mistake was, when he was correct and said something was on the left, I said, "Right!" and then I had to qualify it. "I mean, good, that's the left!" Whew!
Then the girl. She read the last page of her Mowgli chapter. We'll start "The King's Ankh" soon. But next time, she and the new girl are going to read a synopsis of
The Nutcracker, since next Sunday, a week from tomorrow, we'll go see the Ithaca Ballet perform it. The girls take ballet lessons every Saturday morning, so I think they should see a real ballet performance, live. Just the girls are going because the older boy isn't interested in ballet, and I think the younger boy wouldn't like sitting
through a whole ballet. He's too young for that kind of attention span. I suggested it to the parents, and they are getting the tickets.
I'm going to start participles with the girl. She and the others have been doing a lot more writing, and she misused a past participle in her writing because no one ever taught her it, so it's time. She is getting very expressive, though she still makes fairly elementary grammatical errors, which I point out and have her correct. I do emphasize that her writing is very good, and I am nitpicking at the errors to make her better. I want her to have the confidence to keep expressing herself. She read some poetry last time, the one about the wind -- "Who can see the wind?" -- which every child should have heard at least once, IMHO. Her homework assignment was to read it and then write about it. I wanted her to picture the trees bowing their heads, etc. My directives asked a lot of questions about picturing things and she got it! I find these kids are not as adept at picturing things and using their imaginations as I was or my daughter was. So this girl is my big hope for inspiring some imagination.
After that, her older brother. He did his writing, 2 things, one sloppy and one neat. I had not specified for the sloppy one that he had to be neat, so he said, since I didn't tell him so, he didn't take pains to write legibly. Aargh! I have to specify neatness, capitalization, punctuation, spelling, proofread, etc., to have him do it? Aargh! At least they are mostly trained to answer in complete sentences. I drilled that into them. I remember resenting the "complete sentences" rule, too, so I know how they feel, but now I know why my teachers required it. You want to be sure the kids know what a complete sentence is and that they can form a grammatically correct one. The boy is reading from a book I picked up in the free box at the library about water, and there's some info I learned from it. I never thought about it, but do you know that pretty much the same water is on Earth now as when it began? The water is just recycled and redistributed, but it's not added to or removed in any way. Of course! But I never really thought about it before.
Then off to the new girl. She is doing quite well. We still struggle over sounding out words. She wants to guess what the word might be on pretty flimsy evidence. Often what she guesses doesn't even start with the same letter. Today, I explained that wild guesses instead of sounding it out might be a waste of time. She agreed that there were so many choices, but sounding it out narrowed the choices. Yay! Still, it must become a habit.
She also needs more focus. Often, she is in the middle of writing a word and begins to tell me something and forgets that she hasn't finished the word. So I am working on balancing chat with work. I don't mind some discussion, since that, too, is practice with English, but it has to be at the right time not in the middle of doing something else, which just distracts her from the job at hand. One thing I noticed is that when she reads a book, she spends some time looking at the illustrations. She gets cues from them for how the story is going, I think, plus, she seems very visually oriented. I appreciate that she is so interested in the illustrations, but not in the middle of a sentence or written thought, so I'm training her to examine the pictures either when she turns the page or when she finishes reading the page, not in the middle. She's doing that a lot more now without being prompted.
I can't tell you how enthused I am about having this job! It's a dream come true. I love teaching, I think I'm fairly good at it, and it's not one of those high-powered jobs you'd have to dress for success for, which I'm totally not into. I dress for comfort. Also, I'm not having to tutor kids who are bad students because of low IQ or attitude, and the parents support me without question.