TP #4: Thomas’ Snowsuit (the Reprise), Either/Neither, and Fortune Cookies

September 6, 2013

            I returned only two days after meeting P.J. to tutor him again. How convenient for me and Ms. Kim that she has a bilingual child in need of tutoring! When I rang the doorbell, I heard a surprised laugh (Ms. Kim) and movement that quickly subsided. She opened the door, and we chatted for a few minutes while I wondered where P.J. was. She stage-whispered, “He’s in the closet! He wanted to scare you!” and pointed to the nearby shoe closet. I scratched at the door. “P.J.? Are you in there? I think you might be wrong, Ms. Kim….” as I heard small, surreptitious noises from inside. I swung the door open, and it did seem like P.J. was misplaced—he can squeeze into tiny places! We extracted him for his tutoring, his face wreathed in smiles. He managed to scare his mother before we started, too, jumping out from the bathroom. He’s at a mischievous age!

            P.J. showed me three fortune cookies he had on his table. “I got them at Bamboo,” he informed me. He opened one and began eating it without glancing at the fortune.

            “P.J.!” I exclaimed, “What was the fortune?” I wrote it on the board—You will get everything you want through your charm and personality. He was busy telling me how he had convinced the waitress to give him more than his fair share of cookies when Ms. Kim popped her head in.

            “Oh, he insisted on bringing you two cookies. He said they were small, and the cookie you brought him last week was big!” This sweet child had thought of me when out eating and thought to bring me a treat!

            I told him, “You are so considerate. Do you know what that means?” I wrote it on the whiteboard as he shook his head. “It means someone who thinks about what other people would want, like that they might want to eat a cookie. Thank you!” I was touched.

            As with my other students, I spread the books out to let him choose one. I considered holding back Thomas’ Snowsuit, since I had recently been read the whole thing by Chih-Jung. I didn’t, though, and of course P.J. chose that one right away. He read confidently, pausing at the punctuation even if he read without emotion. I did coax out an emphatic “NNNNO” when Thomas refuses to put on his ugly snowsuit, though!

            This book is great to teach that even if a word ends in s, it still is said s’s—Thomas’ is Thomases, effectively. I incompletely explained this to P.J. at first. He read all the Thomas’ perfectly, but Thomas also became plural sounding. He caught on beautifully, though, once I corrected my explanation. We then moved on to discussing vocabulary. “Can we do that fun thing where we write words and use them?” he asked me. No joke. I happily obliged.

            One word in the story, neither, was unfamiliar to P.J. I grant that is much less common than either, which he did know. We practiced example sentences first with either (“Either you can play outside or do your homework,”) and then moved on to neither. It’s tricky to explain! “Either means you get a choice; neither means no choice. You don’t get to do either thing,” I approximated. He understood this but didn’t quite get the placement in a sentence.

            “Neither you get icecream or a treat,” he would say. The correct way would be “You get neither ice cream nor a treat,” but nor sounds so antiquated! As we were making examples (“What if I’m the kid and you’re the dad?” I asked. “And I wanna buy a toy: Can I get Woody? Can I get Buzz?”), he said, “But what if I didn’t know the meaning of the word neither? Oh! I guess my dad would say you can’t have either.” It was a revelation to me: you can convert between the two words! We quickly began practicing that. “You can’t have either toy” is equivalent to “You can have neither toy.” As P.J. noted, it’s confusing because in the second it sounds like you can have the toy. My second example involved ballet (can’t remember why). I said, “What if we were trying to decide between Cinderella and the Swan Princess? And then you say, ‘Wait! We should see the Nutcracker!’ Then we will go to neither ballet, right?” P.J. was meanwhile illustrating the two ballets.

            Time flew once again, and my leaving felt abrupt. I wish I had given him a high-five and told him “Good job!” He is a hard worker. Next time.