Jackson TS #3

 Date/Time: 6/28/21, 3:00pm

Location: CIES

Topic/Skill: We did a little bit of everything: listening, writing, reading, and speaking.

Feedback provided: In this tutoring session, I started with a dictation, where I wrote 5 sentences about traveling to Paris, said them aloud, and had Yesli write down what she heard. In this activity, she was almost perfect, forgetting only a couple suffixes on words and misspelling 2 words as well. After that, I had her write a similar paragraph, based upon the structure of mine, about a place she had travelled to. Again, she did quite well, only making mistakes with a couple of adjectives and one sentence structure in which she was trying to create a time comparison about the last time she had seen her mother. After this, I found an article in the Tallahassee Democrat that I had her read aloud. As we went, we discussed unfamiliar words, idioms, and sentence structures, then I had her orally give me a summary of what we had just read. Her summary was pretty good, aided by the help that I had given along the way when discussing new words, but I could tell nonetheless that she had understood a good portion of what she had read. 

Lessons Learned: I learned that a tutoring session that involves a little bit of everything, like this lesson, is a fun way to learn and makes the session engaging. Yesli was very willing to learn, read, and write. Perhaps the biggest thing I learned, though, is that the crossover between romance languages and English is quite significant. I knew this a little bit already from my studies of French, but I was very impressed by the amount of new, hard words she was able to understand because they were similar to words in Spanish. Being able to make these connections made the session much smoother and allowed us to study more of the sentence structure and style of writing than spending too much time focused on vocabulary.