Peter TS (child) #1

        On Friday 10 March, I tutored Umutoni, my Rwandan tutee, at her family’s apartment on Capital Circle NE. When I arrived, Umutoni and her siblings answered the door; their mother was apparently in the hospital and had given birth. (They facetimed her and she waved to me, smiling, over the phone.) There were no other adults present. I began the lesson by asking Umutoni to recite the alphabet; she did so perfectly. Then I asked her to write it out. She did well up to the last few letters (WXYZ), but I gave her space to think and she was able to correct herself. (She had transposed W and X.) Umutoni knows only a few basic sentences, like, ‘please, take a seat’, or, ‘I like to play’. I began to teach her new words. I pointed to objects in the room and asked what they were. She did well with the words ‘table’ and ‘chair’; knew the words for basic food items like ‘banana’ and ‘apple’; but didn’t know what a ‘sofa/couch’ was, or what ‘roof’ or ‘ceiling’ meant. We then worked on numbers, and she showed off that she knew the numbers up to one-hundred. She knew two-hundred, three-hundred, and so on, but couldn’t write out the numbers between them (one-hundred and one, or one-hundred and fifty five, for example).