TP #7: Digestion and Punctuation Marks

September 13, 2013

            It was a Friday when I came to tutor PJ, and he was not thrilled. “Usually we say Friday is Fun Friday and he doesn’t have to study,” Ms. Kim explained. “But with his open house on Monday, we had to schedule it this way.” PJ had a long face, poor thing.

            To ease into our tutoring session, we didn’t jump right into reading. PJ had a lot of Legos strewn across his bed, including a large plane and an air traffic control tower. I sat on his bed with him and asked him to tell me about his toys. He quickly became animated, explaining that the air traffic controller “tells the planes what to do” and opening up the cargo areas in the plane to show me. While still on the bed, I told him I found the book we were reading so interesting. “What do bones do again?”

            We smoothly transitioned to his desk as he used his whiteboard to draw his rendition of the skull (made of separate bones that then join as you grow older) and the brain. We also reviewed the respiratory system. I enjoyed PJ’s explanation of the “good gas and the bad gas” (oxygen and carbon dioxide) and their entering the lungs.

            The pages we read that day focused on digestion. I asked PJ to show me in the diagram where the stomach was, small and large intestine, etc. We were eating at the time, so it was easy to begin talking about digestion. “What is this called?” I asked PJ, chewing exaggeratedly.

“Chewing,” he told me.

 “And this?”

“Swallowing!”

After about 40-45 minutes, we changed gears to discuss PJ’s recent performance on a vocabulary test. He switched two words in a matching section (imitation and slurped). I rewrote the sentence along with the five examples on the board.

“Oh…This is hard,” he said.

“Let’s put each word in the blank one by one,” I suggested. “Don’t crumbs your drink! Does that work?”

“No,” he smiled. “Oh! Slurped! That’s when you drink like this,” he said, imitating slurping. His sudden recognition of the word was gratifying because it meant he remembered our discussion, but it was concerning that he didn’t remember at the time of the test.

The other mix-up, imitation, was harder. The sentence read, “If you’re going to act like an animal, do the ______ outside.”

“Noise?” PJ ventured. I could see his point. Usually you make a noise, but it still sounds possible. However, there was a more appropriate sentence for noise that he did get correct. I reminded him of what imitation means and how we mimicked animals. I saw comprehension again dawn in his eyes.

“Anytime you pretend to be something you’re not, you’re doing an imitation. Like this: To infinity, and beyond!” I deepened my voice and stretched out my arm. “I’m doing an imitation of Buzz Lightyear,” I told him.

For the following weeks, I will see PJ on Monday and Wednesday, which should be better for his vocabulary retention and the timing of it all. I hope that my method of putting the word up and then discussing it and creating sentences is effective. He seems to think it’s fun, at least.

Finally, we discussed punctuation. In a recent quiz, PJ had to choose between a period, an exclamation mark, and a question mark for 10 sentences. He correctly chose all the question and exclamation marks, but he missed all the periods. He didn’t actually ever put a period, so he missed four. I asked him, “What are periods?”

He told me, “They’re for at the end of a sentence, you have to wait before you keep reading.” Bless his heart! That is what I’ve been teaching him while we read, but that’s a pretty limited definition. I decided to explain periods as giving the tone for the sentence.

“When you’re just telling something, when you’re calm, then it’s a period. When you are angry or excited, it’s an exclamation mark.” He was familiar with the format of questions. I then rewrote the sentences from his quiz on the board, sans punctuation, to see what he thought. This time, he chose periods as well as the other two forms of punctuation. Today I’ll need to check on it again, but I hope that the idea of punctuation meaning emotion resonated with him. To end, we discussed angry versus proud versus excited, since PJ seemed to think they were all similar.