Jennifer TS#2

Today was my second session with Rina. I had assigned her homework from our last session, but she had forgotten to do it. It was expected, but Rina took responsibility and said she would have it finished by Wednesday (which would be our fourth session since I'll be seeing her again tomorrow morning) along with the homework I assigned her today.

I started off asking her if she knew some of her parts of speech: noun, adjective, verb, and adverb. She had trouble defining what an adverb was so I explained--then I moved on to an activity. Using her whiteboard, I wrote out a list of adjectives, nouns, verbs, and adverbs, in this order. I told her to pick each one and write out a sentence. It was expected that the sentences would turn out funny; like this one: "Small Jennifer danced quickly." She had fun mixing and matching and was even creative with her punctuation. Her last sentence was, "Did the funny frogs sing rudely?" I could tell from the activity that Rina was a very meticulous child, easily distracted if the topic doesn't interest her. I knew I had to come up with more activities to pique her interest.

We moved onto a worksheet where she had to fill in the missing vowels--she sounded out each word carefully and made sure she made no mistakes. Then we moved onto another fill-in-the-blank worksheet, focused on using is or are. I explained to her when to use is or are in a sentence and she flew through each one, but made sure to ask questions when she wasn't so sure. For example, the sentence started off with "Mars ____ ..." She asked if Mars was plural because of the s and I told her no, Mars was a name of a planet and that there was only one. She went through the same issue with Venus, but understood the concept and filled in the answer correctly. Because she was so fascinated by planets, she pulled out a solar system book she had and she read it to me out loud. Her pronunciation still needs a little work, but she tried her best to enunciate slowly and carefully. She asked a few questions along through the pages, which I did my best to answer. I noted that she was a very curious child. I'm planning to bring in some books for tomorrow's session so we could focus on reading.

Finally, to end the session, we gathered in the living room where Pam and Zoe were having their session and played Scramble (for juniors). Since none of us knew how to play, we made a few simple rules; like, the first person that makes a word wins the game or if they couldn't place a letter on the board, they pick out one from the bag, etc. Rina ended up winning by filling in two words: jeep and star!

Booyah, Pam.