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Class Observation 3

For my third class observation, I watched a recorded video of Mr. Flemming's Advanced Composition class. The topic of the class was cause and effect essays. I thought it was interesting how to build the class up to creating their own topic from scratch, he had them work in stages. In the first stage, the students were provided with a cause and had to come up with their own effects. In the second stage, the students were given an effect and had to come up with some causes. In the last stage they had to do both on their own. I guess this might count as the scaffolding method, where support is provided at the beginning of the lesson and then slowly taken away. Mr. Flemming did a good job of allowing the students to talk at their tables and work together, and of creating a class discussion about the topics at hand. I did notice that he didn't really provide modeling, but maybe since the students were not really writing whole essays on their own that wasn't as important. Also, i...
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Ceara TS# 16

Met with Renata today 5/30. We practiced timed speaking. I used the rubric and format provided by CIES and we practiced completion rather than stopping when we reached a certain time. She managed to get down to 1:07 for her fastest, which is still a bit off for the 45 second goal, but I thought it was great progress for her level. She expressed her need for a broader vocabulary and we were looking into finding her a dictionary at the library so that when she was writing her sentences she could come up with the words she wanted to express.
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Ceara TS#15

Had my last session with Marcelle on 5/29. Since it was our last day, we decided to just play a game. I had her “teach” me how to play monopoly. She cheated multiple times and won, obviously. But I was very satisfied with the session because it was the most I’d ever seen her talk. Our parting was kind of sad for me. She asked if I was coming tomorrow and I said no because it was my last day, but she very confidently said that I was coming tomorrow. Overall, tutoring her has been a very worthwhile experience and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
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Ceara TS#14

Met with Renata on 5/20. She has begun learning about the dreaded present perfect verb tense. We went over that for a bit, but it took a bit for her to understand it, particularly when to use it. Luckily the class I have been interning in had just gone over this, so it was a subject I was relatively confident in. We also went over her reading activity. She didn't understand the term "branch" so I drew (a very bad) tree and told her the term branch meant literally the branches of a tree, but we also used it for things that were "branching off" from the main subject. Like the branches of government.
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Ceara TS#13

Met with Do-Jun on 4/19. I went online and found a list of common American phrases and picked out ones that I hear relatively often and I went over those with him. That took up about half of our time and after that he asked me about different ways of greeting people. Specifically how to greet and say farewell to someone that he hadn't seen for a long time. I gave him a few examples but "Good to see you again" and "I hope to see you again" were the ones that he seemed to like the most.
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Ceara TS# 12

Met with Do-Jun on 4/12. It was our first session so we mostly just talked and went over his expectations and what he was looking to learn. His English was very good, he just expressed that he wasn't comfortable with his vocabulary and when to use it. So I'm going to try to pay attention to some phrases I hear relatively often and teach them to him our next session.
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Ceara TS#11

Met with Marcelle on 5/22. She did much better today then last week. The library was doing a book sale today and the librarian offered to pitch in a dollar if I wanted to incorporate it into our lesson. I also gave Marcelle on of my dollars and she picked out two books for herself. She was incredibly happy and I think that helped out a lot with the lesson. We also made a break through with learning the best way for her to learn words. She has these flashcards with words on the front and pictures on the back that we've used before. In the middle of using them she started spelling them on her white board and picking out sounds and writing those. Like "in" she found in king and "ra" in straw. So I got her to pick a sound and organize her word cards to pick out the ones that had that sound and she did really well!
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