Ryan - Kid1 (TP#3)

TP – Child

I met Jason for the first time at the county library today. His English skills are very advanced for a child who has only been in the States for a year and a half—I guess the Chomsky bits of his brain have been fully stimulated. He writes like a champ, he reads and comprehends expertly, and he has a vocabulary that I can only assume must be at least as large as some of his native peers.

I really like what Bobby did here with his diagnostic tests, so I recreated his worksheets with some new questions. I also went and found some writing that I did when I was in second grade. Jason was quite tickled to see that I made those kinds of mistakes, too. He fixed all of the spelling errors (or at least identified words that might be spelled wrong and asked for my help to spell them) first, and then I showed him a grammar error in the second sentence (“there was elephants”). Once he realized there were grammar errors, he read the paragraph again, finding about 70% of the errors. It’s definitely a good way to tell exactly what areas he’s strong in, and which ones he could use some more tutoring.

Some things we will work on in the future are article use, pronunciation, spelling (via writing sentences for grammar—he is really great with his grammar, and if he made a mistake once, he didn’t make it again the rest of the lesson), and subject-verb agreement with words like do/does/is/are/was/were etc. We will also write more so he knows that phrases like “My favorite animal is the tiger because it’s Korea native animal” just sound awkward even after simple grammatical adjustments”…I think that will jut come through greater vocabulary, and reading more sentences to see how words are structured within sentences so that they sound ok.

So we did the diagnostic I prepared for about half an hour, worked on his grammar correction homework for about fifteen (just the first couple sentences) and then I asked him to go grab his favorite book and bring it back (Jason spends a lot of time at the library J). He came back with a little book and we took turns reading pages…though I did kind of trick him into reading many more pages than I read. We read a chapter, and his comprehension as checked throughout the reading was flawless, probably better than mine would be if I had to give the recap.

I really enjoyed spending my hour with Jason. I think tutoring kids, for me personally, feels a lot more rewarding than tutoring adults feels. Plus, Jason’s just an adorable kid with a lot of enthusiasm for school (School!)—I couldn’t have asked for a better tutee.



I also met another Korean guy in the library who was fascinated by me working with lil’ Jason. We got to talking, and he’s very interested in having his child tutored (I think he said he is 6yo but I might be wrong). He was a really nice guy by my judgment, so I gave him your email, Ms. Kim, I hope that’s ok J