Award-Winning Private Languages Tutoring in Pomona, CA

I asked the student to do a small reading assignment on writing, as well as give me another example of his own. We started the session speaking of writing in "general." I wanted to see where the student was at in thinking about grammar, style, structure, writing, etc. We also discussed the best way to proceed, and decided to work on timed writing strategies for his exam: how it's different from other kinds of writing, and how best to write a compelling essay in a certain allotted time. He is a driven student and person who wants to succeed. We will continue to talk about what "successful" writing is.

Today we started by reviewing previously learned vocabulary and sentences through the student signing sentences and questions I typed to her. She needed some reminding about what Non-Manual Markers (NMM) to use with questions, but overall she did well recalling a lot of what she has learned thus far. She continues to mix up the signs for "you" and "your", but is able to correct herself when attention is drawn toward it. We then did more with the topic of food. After having her answer some questions, we played 20 questions with food. This forced her to use "your" and the NMM for questions repeatedly. Next we worked on some new topics including time and weather. The student did well with these and was able to apply these concepts into sentences and questions. Overall, she seemed a bit more confident tonight in her expressive use of ASL.

We went over a lot of material today. The student seems to be doing really well! We went over how to say the time and day.

We had a really good session. We looked at the student's homework, which was to write a paragraph about what she did last year in the preterite. She did a great job. She told me they are working on their morning routine verbs, so we ran through those, focusing on reflexive verbs. She told me about her morning routine. For her class, she has to order a pizza, so we walked through that and practiced a couple of times. We went through the alphabet again and finished with some conversation.

This was our first session. As the student already knows a bit of Spanish, we had short conversations so I could gauge what was needed. His goals are to be able to read and write Spanish, so I wrote short and basic sentences for him to read out loud. He already has the competency and knowledge to read. I just think a plan of sticking to it and always having reading and writing materials will be a good step for our next session. We went over the Spanish alphabet just so he could have an idea as to the basics of Spanish sounds.

We covered regular verb conjugations and their corresponding subject pronouns. The student missed some examples of first person plural (nosotros or we) exercises that would list several names and the speaker would include him or herself by saying "and I." The student's attitude was good and he had some improved recent grades to show the results of his persistence. I wrote out some practice exercises for him to show me the next time we meet. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much he had improved over our last meeting by using the strategy of analyzing the subject of the sentence, substituting a pronoun for it and applying the verb conjugation rules.