Claire TS #5

Date/Time: March 24, 6:30-8:00pm

Location: Tutee’s home in Sienna Square Apartments

Topic/Skill: To Be + not and opposites

I met with my child tutee Damarce and 4 of her sisters on Friday. I’ve been going way over in my time with them, but I had somewhere to be an hour and a half after the start of our tutoring session this time, so that really helped my keep my lesson simple and not stay too long! This week I taught the girls some key “opposites,” or adjectives, mostly describing physical appearance, such as short, tall, slow, and fast. I gave them each a copy of a handout with the 12 words and pictures and had them write in the equivalent in their language, since they are all able to write in their language and seem to really like having this information.  We practiced pronouncing each one and I gave example sentences. I went over the verb To Be with them last week, so I reviewed it this week and showed them how the word “not” could be added after the verb in the simple present to make the sentence negative. Then I had each of them give me a sentence describing how she is (using one of the vocabulary words). I was really glad that they were able to do this! It’s been hard to get them to create complete sentences and speak them out on their own. After that I went around asking them questions for more practice (“Are you tall or are you short?”). Then I laid out some pictures of farm animals on the table and described one of them using the vocabulary terms and colors and they had to guess which animal it was. They did a good job with that! I think next time/going forward, I want to do some more fun games to get them using the vocabulary. I have been doing some fun activities at the end of the lesson each time where they listen to a song and learn a new dance move, but I think the vocabulary practice activities I’ve been doing have all been fairly similar and not super engaging. If it’s more fun or competitive they will be eager to use the words and I know the information is more likely to stick.