TP #1 Caitlin

I met my tutee, PJ, and after taking a few minutes to introduce ourselves and get to know each other in our first session, we started our session. PJ is bilingual. He is a great student but because he is learning two languages, he is behind his classmates in some areas right now. For example, PJ reads well but his reading comprehension is weaker than other students his age and his vocabulary is also a little behind.  The lesson plan was broken down into two parts: reading comprehension and vocabulary.

 For the first part of the session, PJ read a book to me and I asked him questions about what we were reading. I asked different types of questions about the characters of the story, what had happened on a certain page, what PJ thought would happen next and interjected questions or short stories to get to know PJ a little bit and also so that we could talk about the meaning of the words that PJ wasn't familiar with. It took us thirty minutes to read the story but it was good to talk with PJ and get to know him a little and he understood everything that he read.

 We then worked on PJ’s vocabulary words from school with the flashcards that I had prepared. Before our session, I wrote out the words on a set of flash cards and made a second set of cards that had pictures that described the words. First, PJ read the words to me one by one and told me what they meant. There were a few words he didn't know and we talked about the meaning of those words.  Then we laid out all the word flashcards and went through the picture flash cards. PJ matched the pictures with the words and he seemed to really like this game. It was good to pair these two activities together because some of PJ’s vocabulary words like “summarize” didn't really have good picture definitions but he pointed out to me how we had summarized the story. I plan to use the written and visual flashcards again.