Matthew TS #15

Tutees: Matthew and David Hong
Date: 10/13/15 5:00-6 PM
In this session, I started by asking Matthew and David to write a few sentences about their previous weekend. They told me about Korean school; it takes 3 hours, and is very strict in comparison to my tutoring sessions. They used proper grammar and punctuation, though their answers were not creative and sentences were short. They used the proper tenses and commas when necessary thus the activity was useful in testing their productive skills. Afterwords, we looked at a short story called, "Paper Dragon Fairy Tale." I started the activity by asking them what they thought would happen in the story. They said, "I don't know." I then suggested them to guess what happens in fairy tales. They figured out I was suggesting something magical and spectacular. We read the story two paragraphs at a time. In the first two paragraphs they summarized by telling me what they thought about the dragon and what will happen in the remaining paragraphs. They comprehended most of the vocabulary words and figured out the ones they did not know by using constructed sentences. They read the last two paragraphs in which the dragon transformed and flew away, escaping its flat world and becoming three-dimensional. I asked them comprehension questions about the dragon and they did excellently, only missing one about a vocabulary term. After this, we went over appropriate vocabulary words I found off the internet. I asked the more esoteric ones that I thought they wouldn't know to use my time most effectively. Though I asked some high frequency words at first, they knew all those so I thought I was wasting my time. With the more difficult words, I used them in context and they would decipher the meaning. Overall, tutoring two students has become easier than it used to be and I think this was the most productive week with both of them.