Greg - TP Child #6

My last session with P.J. was the best one.  He was happy and smiley.  He was also more verbal than he sometimes has been at the end of a long day.  So, with his yogurt drink (I think) and apples in front of him and hot tea in front of me (that's why I'm a TEAcher), we struck out on our adventure.  Today was "Thumbalina." I told him a little about the story for schema building and to focus his attention, but, honestly, this is one of those stories that I didn't read as a kid.  I can remember the song about the story, but that's it.

We dealt with several vocabulary words, practicing each one in sentences that often included his name and fun gestures where they applied.  For example, we talked about Fruit Loops, roller coasters, and airplanes as we learned the word "loop."  The bird in the story was flying in loops.  So I asked P.J. if he had seen roller coasters with loops in them, if he eaten fruit loops, etc.  Then we made sentences that included him and the vocab word and object:  "Do you like to eat fruit loops?  Draw the shape of a fruit loop in the air.  Yep, that's a loop." We did this with "gnaw." I gnawed a slice of apple, making him laugh. Then we compared that with taking a bit of apple.  Thus, he could see how the fish in the story had to gnaw the tough stem of a lily pad so Thumbalina could get away from the mean mother frog.

When we stumbled on the word "past," I discovered that he didn't get it.  This is one of those things he knows in Korean, but not in English.  We spent at least 5 minutes on "past, present, and future."  I tried to link these words to "yesterday, today, and tomorrow," but "past" and "present" where continually being confused with each other.  When P.J. got them right, we celebrated.  After a few successes, I told him to glue them in his brain because we were going to review them again at the end of the hour.  We did, and they didn't roll out of his mouth.  He got the answers right, but he had to think hard.  I gave him a high 5.  I left the words on his white board for him to practice.

Our last 15 minutes dealt with some quiz or homework papers he had gotten back.  He was to make a sentence for both uses of  3 words that each had two uses (watch, can, and ????).  We went over his mistakes and wrote new sentences.  I think his mistakes were related both to word usage as well as to not reading the instructions carefully.

P.J. is a great kid.  He is well on his way to being bi-lingual.  He is in the hard period where the L2 has to face slow but steady progress while his classmates use it as their L1 and fly.  Eventually he will know the blessing of the L2 being automatic while still having the advantage of speaking Korean at the drop of a hat.

Hang in there, Ms. Kim.  Keep up the good work with P.J.