Ryan Kid6 (TP#11)

I met with Jason at the library again to continue studying for his big english and Reading test tomorrow. As usual for Monday nights, we spent the first half of the hour doing his reading homework. It was a story about the beach and lifeguards, and there were a lot of things in the story that were both cultural and unexplained by the text, like white smears on noses (Jason thought they were boogers) and "sun-bleached hair". So it was fun walking him through "a day at the beach" and what that's like.

For the second half, we switched to reading the story he's going to be tested on tomorrow. Even though he forgot the story, we randomly found "Uncle Jed's Barbershop" online somewhere, so we were good to go to study. Like we usually do when we read, I had him read a few paragraphs and then summarize for me. After I came up with a few questions and he answered them perfectly (he must be studying this in class too), I asked him to try to think of some questions that his teacher might ask. I don't know why I thought that would work out, but note to self, that strategy isn't helpful with an 8-year-old haha. I went back to asking questions and I think he's going to crush his test tomorrow...well, I hope so!

Ryan Kid5 (TP#10)

On Sunday, Jason and I met for his big upcoming English test. We went over all of the spelling words, which he seemed to be a pro at. He gets a kick out of spelling "raccoon", so I always asked him that one when he was losing focus and it would zap him back in. We read one of the stories that was going to be on the test. it was a little difficult to keep his attention (I think the thrill of the weekend had zapped all his attention) but I just kept asking him questions that I thought could be on his test (based on assignments of his I've seen) and we got pretty prepared. The real turning point was promising ten minutes of Harry Potter at the end...that got us through the last fifteen minutes of studying pretty well :)

Ryan Kid4 (TP#9)

On Thursday, Jason and I studied for his test on friday. He had a big spelling and definitions test, so we worked on those words with the "7 times" principle we learned in class. I had him write sentences for all of the words, then we took turns making up sentences (verbally) with each one. I challenged him to make up a story with all of his words, and he came up with a pretty good one about an owl and a raccoon and how they had a book due at the library.

We spent the last fifteen minutes reading Harry Potter He really liked reading with me cause it gave him the chance to ask questions about the text that he didn't have the opportunity to ask at home. Plus I love everything HP so I was thrilled when he pulled it out and asked to read together--perfect.

Ryan Kid3 (TP#8)

I met with Jason on Monday to work on his English Homework. It was an FCAT practice that took nearly a full hour to really parse out and get Jason to understand. For some reason, he was having trouble identifying the point of the article. The article was about how technology has helped people to with vision problems to see better, and each paragraph was about a different technology and time. He seemed unable to take so much conflicting information and find the common theme running through each of them.

So I told him to take out a sheet of paper and write down a summary of each paragraph as we read each one together. This really helped him out, because after he had put all of it in his own words, he was much more easily able to identify the actual topic of the paper, instead of being distracted by the details.

We spent the rest of the session answering the questions for the assignment.

Ryan CIES5 (TP#7)

Had a pretty weird tutoring session this time. I was waiting all day at the library and gettin' work done until my tutoring session with the cies folk. Unfortunately, everyone but Husain texted a cancellation about thirty minutes prior. When Husain showed up, he told me he just came to get info for a party from one of the other tutee's. Ouch, lol.

I told him he might as well stay for a bit and get tutored since we were both here, and he was nice enough to oblige for half an hour. He had just taken his (uk toefl i forgot the name) so he wasn't interested in grammar or reading or anything--so we just had a conversation, which I think is exactly what he needed. So we just talked about his plans for the future, and I was sure to give him a lot of practice by asking him like, long questions so that he'd have to articulate more complex responses. I think it was helpful.

Ryan Kid2 (TP#6)

On Monday night, Kid Jason and I met at the library. There's definitely a marked difference between meeting at 630pm, like we did tonight, and at 11am, which we did the first time. Jason's ability to concentrate on what we were doing was severely impaired (and I'm not holding it against him, I'm sure school was a drain and a late meeting time was a pain). Nonetheless, we hammered through a story that I wrote for him about my day so that he could fix my grammatical errors. I tried to set it up so that he could use my writing as a model. We could brainstorm together about what he did that day and then let him write about his day as a writing tutoring assignment. Well, he got tired about halfway through brainstorming and irreversibly distracted by bugs on the counter, so we switched from that task. it was just too extracurricular for jason to devote his energies to. Instead, we worked on an intensive reading assignment about inventions that have helped people with impaired vision experience the world around them more effectively. It was an FCAT prep assignment from school. It took us about 45 minutes to read and answer questions, but it was actually very helpful for jason to have me there showing him the type of information he should be taking notes on as he reads so that he can more effectively answer the questions later on. So booyah.

Ryan CIES4 (TP#5)

I met with Byron and we went over his midterm exams. While he did really well on his exam, he needed help with his article use. He seemed to do really well when choosing the articles in fill-in-the-blank sentence drills, but poorly when filling-in-the-blanks in a paragraph. The confusion comes when an object transitions from being "a" thing to "the" thing. (Mr. Jones has a cow. The cow he owns is sick.) So we went online and found lots of paragraph fill-in-the-blank article drills and worked our way through those. I just asked Byron to try to give the reason for each artcile use, and I think it was really effective. He doesn't "have it" yet, but that'll take time. It was a good tutoring session :)

Ryan CIES3 (TP#4)

CIES Tutoring #3

I met with Byron, Isabella, and our new group member Husain for our third CIES group tutoring session. They had all just finished their midterms (at least in their grammar sessions) and seemed pretty happy about them.

I don’t know if it’s right or not, but I seem to always start my tutoring sessions just chatting for about ten minutes. I’d say it definitely lowers the affective filtering goin’ on, but it also feels a bit unlike the high-structured tutoring sessions I might have been expecting myself to give. Oh well.

Tutoring went really well. We worked on a lot of pronunciation things, mostly on past tense verbs. That –ed is pretty tricky, especially on words like switched and pitched. They also pointed out to me that in our pronunciations, the ending consonant is t’d or d’d depending on the vowel of the next word and the syllaballic pronunciation of the verb (picke’(t)up, swatte‘dat, switche’(t)on, heate’dair) so we worked on that. We did this by reading some past-tense poems (I’m so glad I have Byron in my group, I don’t know how, but he’s always got the perfect material for us to practice with in his notebook). We took turns saying each line of the poem (which contained past-tense –ed ­verbs), listening to me say the words and then repeating. It was genuinely helpful for them to get to practice, so yay.

For the last fifteen minutes, we worked on articles. I think we’ll be working on articles every tutoring session, they’re just so tricky! 

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

Ryan - CIES2 (TP#2)

TP – CIES group tutoring #2

I met with Byron and Isabella for my second CIES tutoring session. I had met with Byron previously, but this was my first time meeting Isabella. She forgot to bring any materials, but Byron brought like…every English thing he has ever done, just like last week haha. I did not have a chance to prepare any specific tutoring materials, and that made me nervous for the session, but I think it actually went pretty well without it. It really opened up this session to look through the things they have been working on at CIES and address specific issues.

We talked a lot about the present perfect and how it is used in English. We went though a lot of drills where asked If/where they have ever done/been things and places. I invited them to ask me questions; it was pretty helpful I think, even though I was being a little confusing at first because I always wanted to say a past perfect first. That tense just sounds easier to my ears, so I had to take a second and really think of sentences where only the present perfect is appropriate and useful.

I told Isabella that next week we will work on some listening and speaking exercises. If anyone knows any great ones, I’d love to hear ideas J

Ryan - CIESTP1 (TP#1)

CIES Tutoring Session 1

On Friday I met with one of my CIES group tutees. Since Isabella and Osamah canceled just before the tutoring session, it was just Byron and me. Byron is an Ecuadorian chef-in-the-making, working on his English skills before pursuing a bachelors degree to make his parents happy, and pursuing an AA-degree at Kaiser college for culinary arts to fulfill his passion for making food. After meeting with foundations level CPs who only wanted to do well on their IELTS or TEFLs, it was such a rewarding experience to spend an hour working with Byron, who had clear intrinsic motivation to speak English. He told me the languages of food are French and English, and he wants to learn them both. Love his passion.

The first ten minutes, we just sat together in our Strozier study room and talked. It was great. Just from conversing, I could diagnose a few issues in his use of the more complex past tense phrases. I wanted to know what he needed help with it, so he showed me a few things that had just been confusing him lately. He was confused about the sentence “I am retired.” He saw am retired as a unique past-tense construction, the meaning of which he couldn’t understand. I gave a lot of examples of those types of adjectives (tired, wasted, potted (plant) etc.) and how they come from past tense verbs, but are adjectives when used this way. I came up with the ‘Potted’ example last, as it is used both ways (potted plant=adjective, the plant is potted=present adjective//passive verb) I didn’t quite know how to explain that those are almost the same thing but different, but I’ll have the answer in our next session. I mean it's basically just that past-tense verbs have been used as adjectives...a lot. Admittedly, they've become adverbs too. Complex. We also looked at some determiner use for 'some/a couple/few'.

At the end of the session, I asked if he wanted to work on a listening drill. I had prepared two stories from the WBEZ Chicago radio program This American Life. I choose a few stories from the show “20 Act in 60 Minutes”. I had already retrieved and simplified for reading the transcripts for Act 8, “The Greatest Dog Name in the World," and Act 13, “More Lies.” Those can be heard here http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/241/20-acts-in-60-minutes and you super should listen to at least ACT 13, ‘cause that story kills me it’s so funny. Anyways, for the first story (Act 8) we read the transcripts first, and I answered his questions about vocab/grammar/meaning. It was revealing showing how poorly produced even native speakers' grammar is when we speak English. I think he appreciated seeing the freedom we have when speaking to make a lot of mistakes, but we briefly discussed some of the rules that don't get broken in speech, namely things like tense and agreement. The next story (Act 13), we listened to first before reading over the transcript, checking comprehension one part at a time, and then read the transcript for full comprehension checking. It was a great little exercise, and he got a laugh out of the stories, especially after we worked through and clarified exactly what was happening and what people meant.

Can’t wait to tutor him again, it was a great session.