Award-Winning Phonics Tutors serving Westminster

Today we worked on organizing the student's next English paper/exam. She picked the more complicated answer to the question of whether Mayella was powerful or not. She decided to argue that as a lonely, poor woman with no friends, black or white, Mayella was not powerful and had little to no control over her own life, let alone the life of others. As we broke it down, she did a great job putting the argument together. Talking through assignments really seems to help her pull her thoughts together.

At the start of our session, he asked me to go over the letter his wife wrote to announce her retirement to her colleagues. I helped him edit the letter for both correctness and style. After that we began our work on grammar trouble spots. For this session he had reviewed and completed some of the exercises in the first chapter. We went over concepts including elements of independent clauses, placement of adverbials, standard word order, and subjects. I had prepared a brief quiz on the material, which he took and did very well on. The only topic in the chapter that he did not really understand was parallel structure, so we did a more in-depth review of this concept. I will send him some exercises on it for our next session.

Tonight, we studied for the vocabulary test that will be Friday. She wrote sentences and worked on the spelling of her words. We felt good about her knowing the synonyms of her words. Also, I helped her with some homework in her religion class. We looked up passages to answer questions.

We began the session by reviewing the 15 words of his spelling contract. In addition to the spelling of the words I also had the student try to provide synonyms and definitions for them. Then I created some decimal addition problems and some 2-digit and 3-digit multiplication problems. We finished by reading some of chapter 7 of "James and the Giant Peach."

The student and I worked on varying types of pronouns and how to identify them in preparation for an exam she had coming up. I did see some scores from some other tests and quizzes, which were all very positive. She was struggling most with demonstrative and interrogative pronouns. I did not leave her with any extra practice and I don't have any concerns about this session.

The concept we covered today was the short i sound. The student needed help with three letter words that had the short i. Two letter words like ig, id, ip were more comfortable for her. The sentences that were done in the last lesson were reviewed, and she did an excellent job reading them. The short i was written in a different color from the other letters to help her focus on the letter and the sound for the day. She used the sliding letters sounds to help to pronounce the words. Extra practice was to practice reading given sentences from the book read today, "Ann's Hat," and practice short i list words. I am happy to see the enthusiasm and progress in reading at this level.