Yesterday I met with my child tutee for the second day in a row. Last time he was very tired and it was a bit of a struggle to get him motivated. This time, he was awake, alert, and full of energy.
Last week, I had assigned him to read the first half of "Call of the Wild." I first asked him for a summary of what he had read. To my surprise, he spent about five minutes going through very specific details. I was impressed with his summary and instead of the typical reading comprehension questions he is used to receiving form me, I decided to use this as an opportunity for open discussion. I asked him about Buck's (the dog in the story) feeling before and after he was taken into captivity. We ended up having a lot to talk about and Matthew seemed interested in finishing the story.
I had brought with me a game for us to play today. I had a bunch of synonym pairs printed out and cut into strips. I mixed them all up on our table and his job was to match each pair. There were quite a few words, so this took a good amount of time to complete. Also, throughout the process there were some unfamiliar words, so I encouraged him to move on to the words he did know. At the end, we looked up the definitions for the remaining words and he finished matching them up. Matthew is good at doing book-work, but I could tell he enjoyed this much more because he got to use his hands and move things around.
In the final minutes of our session, I quizzed him on the vocabulary flash cards that we have made over the past few weeks. I really can tell that having him write out sentences and drawing pictures for each word has helped him by being able to associate the words with them. I reminded him to complete his homework- a rough draft of his opinion paper, and then we were finished.
No comments:
Post a Comment