Paul TP #1 (P.J.)

I tutored P.J. for the first time yesterday evening. He is eight years old and about evenly bilingual (Korean and English). P.J. and I worked on reading comprehension and vocabulary. For the reading comprehension portion, we continued reading the story of Peter Pan that he had been reading in previous tutor sessions.

He did very well with reading out loud. One word that the book repeated was "wicked." P.J. was unfamiliar with the word, so naturally he read it as if it were only one syllable instead of two, such as "picked" or "kicked." After the first time I corrected him, he read pronounced it perfectly every time.

As far as his vocabulary goes, he did pretty well. The list I taught him included a variety of words. On top of the list of about ten words, we went over a couple that came up in conversation. The two that stood out to me most were "doorway" and "oven mitt." Interestingly enough, as Mrs. Kim mentioned, his English vocabulary of some words that are often used around the house is less advanced than other contexts.

P.J. is a very creative child! He was able to create some great examples of some of the vocabulary words that we had gone over. Hopefully the examples I used will help him remember the meanings of the words. One thing I learned not to do is give examples before defining the words... that only confused him by making him think of his own definition which was in fact more narrow than the word's meaning! I'm glad I was able to straighten that out, though!