Award-Winning Reading Tutors serving Portsmouth

The student read from a book that he's selected for our sessions. He is improving his reading fluency by working from the same book each session. He did struggle with some new vocabulary that I introduced in a reading comprehension exercise. We'll continue with the same book next session, and a fresh reading comprehension assignment.

During our session today, we reviewed the student's math homework regarding using estimation to find the difference between two and three digit numbers. We also continued with our story "Fight for Equality" that we started last session. The passage was a challenging on about Justice Marshall's life story. Her reading fluency was spot on, and she was able to answer basic questions. She began to struggle with the open responses questions. Questions such as "Why did the author pick this title?" and "Why did the author write the passage?" proved more difficult. These require a higher level analytical process. We took it one step at a time, and she was able to respond with a well written sentence with some assistance. I have asked her to bring a book she would like to read next session, and we will work on these types of concepts with regard to the story of her choice.

The student is doing very well. She is reading material at a fourth grade level on the reading program, which is one year ahead of her current grade, and understanding it very well. Her father wants her to work more on strategies to attack longer words. I told him that we would do more of that during the next session and I suggested that he put the words from the glossary on flashcards and have her practice them. At the next session, I will make sure to spend some time working on dividing words into syllables and other ways to understand longer words.

Student A and I read Because of Mr. Terupt. We discussed the purpose of having different characters narrate each chapter. He had difficulty understanding some of the plot events and we will continue to work toward clarity. Student B and I read from Upside Down Magic. We approached the climax of the story and discussed the direction the author was taking the plot. Student C practiced writing uppercase letters. He struggled with using space appropriately in his writing, but got better and better. We also read from several new short stories.

We covered reading comprehension skills in terms of story sequencing, vocabulary, how context can alter vocabulary meaning, prediction of story events, metaphors, double-meaning words, and deriving vocabulary definitions from context. We also covered some limited reading mechanics, i.e., word segmentation and word 'families.' The student's attitude was good, and she is becoming more comfortable asking questions.

We started with the student's handwriting homework. After he finished that, we did the shark web sheet. For the shark web sheet, we found information in books and wrote down facts about sharks. Then we cut out the pictures and glued them in place. After that, I tested him on his spelling words. He made a mistake with a few words (6 out of 29) so I had him write those words a few times each so that he could learn the correct spellings. The words he got wrong were: continents, bivalve, carnivore, herbivore, plankton, and zooplankton.