TP #2 Caitlin

This week, our focus was reading comprehension because PJ had already worked on vocabulary this week. We spent 30 minutes reading a Flyguy book. I liked how book had phonetic spelling of new vocabulary words in parentheses. I asked PJ about the meaning of these words after he sounded them out and he didn't always know the meaning. The words were defined in the passage so I encouraged him to reread to figure out the meaning and then we would talk about it. PJ told me he wished he had read the book before I got there so he would already know the answers but I told him that I was very glad that he had waited to read the book with me and that we were learning all about sharks together.

                Next, we went through a worksheet from school. The assignment was to read a story and there were 10 questions about comprehension. I asked PJ to read the instructions on both pages before we started and encouraged him to read the questions before reading the story. He didn't seem to like this strategy so he read me the story and then we looked at the questions. Completing the worksheet was challenging because PJ wanted to do more than the worksheet asked for. For example, he was supposed to list two things that happened in the beginning of the story. I asked him to tell me two things that happened in the beginning of the story and he had no problem answering me orally but he wanted to write out his answer in a sentence (that included both answers) so he had a hard time completing the worksheet because he was including too much information in each answer instead of making a list and he was getting frustrated. We tried listing out PJ’s observations on a whiteboard but he still wanted to write complete sentences for his answers. We didn't finish the worksheet and I didn't correct spelling errors because he was getting frustrated.  His mom told me that another tutor had been focusing on writing complete sentences so this could explain PJ’s difficulty with this assignment.