Molly McQueeney TS#2

Date/Time: May 12, 2020. 5:30 - 6:30 PM

Topic/Skill: For this tutoring session we focused on reading comprehension and increasing vocabulary. Ahmad told me last week that he wanted to improve his reading and enjoyed reading short stories with messages or morals. I found an online version of Aesop's Fables and chose two for us to read together. We read "The Tortoise and the Hare" and "The Oak and the Reeds". 

Feedback provided to tutee: I created some reading comprehension questions based on the story that we discussed together. Ahmad read the stories aloud to me and I took note of words he stumbled on or pronounced incorrectly. We then reviewed these words at the end of the story, corrected the pronunciation, and defined them. I found that for many of the words Ahmad was confusing them with another word he already knew, or the same word that has a different meaning. For the words Ahmad was less sure about we put the word in a sentence so he could better understand how to use the word in context. 

Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned: I learned that with tutoring, and teaching in general, the instructor must be very flexible. I had planned a much longer lesson for our tutoring session, but we only completed the first part of my plan because reading the two stories took much longer than expected. I was glad we focused so much on these two stories because it showed me the importance of increasing Ahmad's vocabulary and it demonstrated his desire to improve his reading skills. I also gained a better understanding of how difficult vocabulary words can be for English students. For example, when explaining the word "firm", I said it is the opposite of soft, or a synonym for hard. Ahmad asked if it could be used in the sentence "That test was very firm.", replacing "hard", with "firm" in this instance. I had to explain that while they are synonyms for one definition of "hard", they cannot be used the same way in this context. Another example was the word "might", as in strength. This word, and several others, Ahmad recognized and knew the meaning of, however he did not know the new meaning and had to understand that the same word had multiple definitions.