I have created a Weebly site, where I will be cross-posting my tutoring reflections. You can find them within the "Tutoring Blogs" page under "Keesha" (I changed her name for privacy).
Hi, Bridget!
You're Weebly Blog is amazing-great work. It is wonderful to have a site from which you can continue to add to and reflect upon throughout your career. Wonderful job of personalizing it and making it your own, while also incorporating your interaction with your students.
Best, Natalie
Tutoring Session #1: Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Today was my first meeting with my fourth grade student, Kashijion. She's a wonderfully bubbly little girl, very eager to share her thoughts and even more eager to learn. She told me today that there isn't a single subject that she doesn't like to learn about because she finds them all interesting. WOW!!! A teacher's dream! :) She especially likes when people ask her questions and she knows the answers. As we discussed further, I found that she really loved being positioned as an expert. In situations in which she felt like she was teaching me, she effused information with great energy. She absolutely adores pandas, and she launched into a full description of pandas' habitat, diet, and temperament. She even went into great detail about an earthquake in China that forced many pandas to be relocated to reserves which were places, she explained, where pandas could be kept safe.
Isn't it great when students take a liking to a particular subject? I wonder if she enjoys reading informational text as much as she does narrative texts. Research indicates that good informational text readers are good fiction readers; however, good fiction readers are not always good at reading informational text.
She claims that she loves to read, but it seems that she doesn't sit down and actually read very often. She likes to do activities with her family, like playing board games, playing video games, or watching movies. I gathered from her discussion of school that she is part of the RTI program at her school. She describes reading class as mostly reading from packets of information and playing games like Jeopardy. When asked what a good reader does, she was able to describe a list of good reader strategies with cute names like "Stretchy the Snake," in which students cover up a word that they don't know and sound it out as they reveal it letter by letter, and "Hoppy the Frog," in which they cover up the word, skip over it, and try to figure out a word that makes sense.
It would be great to get Kashijion into a text with a bit more meat to it. I don't know how her school promotes reading, so will not make assumptions as to whether or not she is reading books of interest or interesting books. Regardless, I would try to supplement her reading with additional texts of interest. It would be great if she could spend some time reading at home. It would be great if she gets hooked in books. Research indicates that just 10 minutes of additional reading at home/day makes a difference (Richard Anderson).
The first thing that she mentioned when describing a good reader, however, was that good readers knew every word on the page that they were reading. I asked her for an example of someone who was a good reader in her class, and then I asked if that person knew every word when they were reading. She agreed that they didn't have to know every single word to be a good reader, but she still placed a lot of emphasis on knowing how to read phonetically and "spell right." She said that she absolutely loved language arts last year when she was in third grade because they learned about the parts of speech. She loves learning about words, and the one thing that she said she wanted to work on in tutoring was learning more "big words." She was very adamant that if we do anything over the course of this semester, she wants to expand her vocabulary. I am thinking that it may be a fun lesson to work with prefixes, suffixes, or word roots, because I think that would be something in which she would be very interested.
Bridget, this is a great idea!! Another suggestion would be to create word cards. When she reads a word that is new in her vocabulary, she can write down the word on an index card. On the reverse side she can record the meaning and the sentence in which the word was found. For organization purposes, you could hole punch and add these to a ring (I'll supply these). When you meet, you can review the word and if she recalls the meaning and uses it appropriately in a sentence, make a mark on the card. Once she has five marks, she can remove the card adding it to another ring indicative of reaching mastery level of the word.
Additionally, by only adding words as they are discovered through text, this may encourage her to read more. :)
She greatly enjoys poetry and we read some Shel Silverstein poems together. After reading them, she was able to grasp the meaning and the humor in the simple poems. As she was reading, she consciously made sure that what she was reading made sense. She omitted a word in the first poem, and went immediately back to re-read the sentence when she realized that it didn't sound right.
Overall, I look forward to working with Kashijion and I think we'll be having a lot of fun this semester! Excellent!!! :)
Tutoring Session #2: Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Pre-Tutoring Technology Reflection:Today, I will probably be using an interactive online activity with my student called "President for a Day," courtesy of PBS Kids. Because Kashijion wants to run for class president next year, I thought it would fun to use this semester honing in on the literate activities that presidents (of countries, teams, or even student council) use as they go about their duties. I hope the "President for a Day" activity would be a fun way to get Kashijion thinking about presidential responsibilities.
REFLECTION:
The one thing that I wanted to do today was record Kashijion's oral reading, so that was what we started with. I let Kashijion peruse the bookshelves until she settled on The Little Piano Girl by Ann Ingalls and Maryann Macdonald. The text seemed to be at a good instructional level (I will probably write more on this once I have completed my running record and analysis). She often looked up at me, expecting me to tell her what a difficult word was. When I encouraged her to read it herself, she always sounded it out. She had named so many different reading strategies the last tutoring session that I was hoping that she would use a few of them during her oral reading, but I was disappointed. After she finished reading, she wanted to hear herself read the whole story again. I told her that we could listen to a part of it. As I began playing back her oral reading, she seemed very disappointed in herself and her reading. So, I paused after she self-corrected herself using her sound-it-out strategy and told her, "Wow! Did you hear that? You're such a clever reader! Did you hear how you figured out that word? That was a smart strategy to use, don't you think?" :) It is so important that students understand we all make "miscues" when reading. You may want to also share with her how you make miscues and this will happen regardless of how great of a reader we consider ourselves as being. After that little confidence-booster, she felt much more comfortable with her reading.
From what you shared, it sounds as if she is relying heavily on phonics. Graphophonics should be used as one of her cuing systems, but as you are probably realizing she may need growth in semantics. I would encourage you to pre-read the text and cover words that can easily be predicted with sticky notes (cut out pieces if the font is small). After she provides possible words, you may want to then add the first letter of the word. I would not have the first letter of the word immediately available, because if she is over relying on phonics this may serve as a "bump" in the road, especially since she is a conscientious learner.
Last week, she had enthusiastically told me about her plans to run for class president and student council next year. Tugging on that interest, I told her that we would be learning about what it means to be a president. I told her about my plan for her to write and record herself giving a "State of the Union"-like address. At first, she panicked that she would be "on TV," but when I told her that we could record her voice and put pictures to it (like a photo story), she seemed very excited. After that, we began working on a graffiti board with what a president needs to do and what a president needs to know. She didn't seem to have very many ideas for the duties of a president, so we moved into the computer lab to work on "President for a Day" on the PBS website.
Terrific work at picking up on her interests and tying it into a literacy activity. Kudos to you!
She was excited to use the computer and was engaged in the beginning of the interactive. However, as the interactive went on, she became more fatigued and hungry (it was nearing 7:00 in the evening) Is she eating dinner before she attends tutoring? and stopped trying to make sense of the stories being told. It was a shame, considering that the activities more closely linked with literacy (as opposed to going for a swim and riding in a limousine) were later on. She was eager to read whatever was on the computer, but stopped trying to make sense of what the stories were saying. I hope she is eating dinner before tutoring. Did you ask her if she had an opportunity to eat beforehand? Yikes, I would be fatigued, too.
As we came to the first page of the game included a lot of information on the requirements to become president of the U.S.A., and she begged me to write these down on her graffiti board. I told her that she didn't have to, but she didn't seem to believe me. I finally asked her, "You know that this isn't homework, right?" "It isn't?" she replied. I obviously need to be more clear about the purpose of tutoring next session. I think I can also come up with some more engaging activities that will keep her more fully involved throughout the full hour. Sounds like you are doing a great job, so far. Also, please know you can get up and walk to the drinking fountain for a break.
Tutoring Session #3: Tuesday, March 1, 2011
The one thing that Kashijion said that she wanted to learn in our session was "big words." I had written in my first reflection that I hoped to do a lesson word roots, and today I followed through. First, I introduced one of my favorite books of all time: Frindle by Andrew Clements. I initially asked Kashijion where she thought words came from and how words came to be. Kashijion said that they came from the dictionary, and I prompted her until, in a flash of realization (as many of her great moments of learning occur!), she admitted that words must be made up by people like herself. Then, we moved on to reading a printed out passage from Clements' website FAQ in which he describes where the idea for Frindle came from. Kashijion got a bit tired reading the text, and we began to switch on and off. But, just as I had noticed during our previous lesson, Kashijion got fatigued and began omitting words and switching up words in ways that didn't make sense. Once we had finished the passage, I asked her questions about what she had read, and she could recite direct pieces of text that I had read aloud, but couldn't remember what she had read. I think that by reading animatedly, I had left more of an impression than what she skimmed over herself.
Then, we moved on to the root words lesson. I showed her the example word "hemisphere." She was so proud of herself that she could tell me that it meant a section of the globe! I asked her how she had known that, and she said that they had talked about it in social studies. I asked her if there was a name for a strategy (like "Hoppy the Frog" or "Stretchy the Snake") in which she looked for smaller words inside other words to figure out what the bigger words meant. Kashijion said that there wasn't, that she had never heard of that strategy before. I have to admit that I was surprised, given all of the different strategies that she had been learning in her reading classes. I then wrote out the word "hemisphere" on my little whiteboard and asked her if she recognized any words inside "hemisphere." Initially, she said no, but then a lightbulb went of and she shouted, "SPHERE!" "What's that?" I asked. "My brother learned about that in geometry," she told me, "It's like a circle." "Ah," I said, "Well, what if I told you that the root 'hemi' means 'half'?" I wrote out the word "half" under "hemi" and "circle" under "sphere." "Half circle... Half a circle... OH!" she smiled, "The word 'hemisphere' means 'half a circle!'"
She was hooked. She kept begging for harder and harder words. I showed her some words that had Latin roots and explained what they meant. For example, I used "telephone." I had her draw a line where she thought there were two distinct roots, and she split it between "tele" and "phone". She postulated guesses as to what the two roots meant, sounding it out and trying out different meanings. I eventually told her that "tele" meant distance and "phone" meant sound. I then asked her what she thought "phonics" meant, armed with this new information.
We went on like this and she eventually started coming up with her own words. Most of them were compound words like "landline" or "earpiece," and I mentioned that those were known as "compound words" but didn't press the distinction. Her eagerness for breaking up words was not to be hampered. I think that revisiting root words and compound words in a later lesson would be useful, if only just to reinforce the action of breaking apart words and looking for meaning to steer her away from just pure graphophonic reliance. Besides, she liked it!
Tutoring Session #4: Tuesday, March 15, 2011
This lesson, we focused on prediction. I started out by asking Kashijion if she ever predicts while she's reading. She said that she does in school, that her class makes predictions as a class when they were reading something together. She told me that she never predicts as she is reading, though. She does have a strategy called "Hoppy the Frog," in which she skips over the word and comes back to it after she is finished with the sentence or the section. Although she seems to understand this strategy in theory, she does not seem to employ it in her oral reading. This is something that I hope to work on in future tutoring sessions.
For this session, I had printed out a list of first lines from different books, without the book titles. I had her read each of them and predict what was going on in the story and what was going to happen next. From each sentence, we tried to answer the questions, "What kind of story is this?" "What does this sentence tell us about the story, characters, and/or setting?" and "How does this sentence make you feel?" The answers to these questions offered us a plethora of knowledge about what the stories may be about.
For example, when she read, "Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin," Upon reading this, Kashijion stated, "It's a baby book!" When I asked her how she knew that, she described to me that the "bump, bump, bump" rhythm was often found in children's picture books. She also noted the presence of Edward Bear who, she assumed, was a teddy bear simply because one man cannot carry a bear down stairs. She predicted that Edward Bear, real bear or not, would have a serious headache after being dragged down the stairs in such a manner. She predicted that the story would center around the characters of Christopher Robin and Edward Bear, and was very surprised to hear that "Edward Bear" was, in fact, "Winnie-the-Pooh," but she immediately recalled who Christopher Robin was. For each sentence, she was surprised at how much information she could draw out of the story, and I was surprised at how lively and engaging was her imagination. She had me in stitches!
The rest of the sentences went in a similar manner to the first line of A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, but the one line that really caught her interest was the first line of The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi: "Not every thirteen-year-old girl is accused of murder, brought to trial, and found guilty. But I was just such a girl, and my story is worth relating even if it did happen years ago.” She assured me, time and time again, that she would have to go out and look for the book. I was very disappointed with myself for putting an intriguing line on the list that was at a much higher reading level than her own. That being said, I am thrilled that she was so engaged by the sentence that she was ready to head to the library straight after our tutoring session (which, I do think, is much more important than finding an "appropriate reading level" for her).
At the end of our decoding and deciphering session, we did a quick 5-minute drawing activity (don't worry just yet, Natalie, the rationale will follow!). We did an activity known in art classes as an "exquisite corpse" in which one person draws a head, another person draws a body, and yet another person draws the legs of one creature on a sheet of paper without seeing any of the other people's work. Kashijion and I just swapped two pieces of paper (she drew head, I drew body, she drew legs). The reason behind this was to harness this creativity that I had noticed bubble up throughout the lesson. For our next session, we will begin a sort of storytelling in which we incorporate the "exquisite corpse" format. Kashijion will write a few sentences about something that is happening to a character. I, seeing only the last line, will continue the story. The next week, Kashijion will continue the story with only the last line that I had written as a reference. I think that this will be a fun writing activity because the format of it keeps it interesting and engaging, and the outcome will probably turn out a bit wacky. The wilder the events, the more outlandish the vocabulary, the better. I assured her that I didn't care about spelling or neatness of handwriting. All I want is to read a really interesting story.
She assured me that she would most definitely deliver :)
Bridget's Tutoring Page
I have created a Weebly site, where I will be cross-posting my tutoring reflections. You can find them within the "Tutoring Blogs" page under "Keesha" (I changed her name for privacy).
Hi, Bridget!
You're Weebly Blog is amazing-great work. It is wonderful to have a site from which you can continue to add to and reflect upon throughout your career. Wonderful job of personalizing it and making it your own, while also incorporating your interaction with your students.
Best,
Natalie
Tutoring Session #1: Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Today was my first meeting with my fourth grade student, Kashijion. She's a wonderfully bubbly little girl, very eager to share her thoughts and even more eager to learn. She told me today that there isn't a single subject that she doesn't like to learn about because she finds them all interesting. WOW!!! A teacher's dream! :) She especially likes when people ask her questions and she knows the answers. As we discussed further, I found that she really loved being positioned as an expert. In situations in which she felt like she was teaching me, she effused information with great energy. She absolutely adores pandas, and she launched into a full description of pandas' habitat, diet, and temperament. She even went into great detail about an earthquake in China that forced many pandas to be relocated to reserves which were places, she explained, where pandas could be kept safe.
Isn't it great when students take a liking to a particular subject? I wonder if she enjoys reading informational text as much as she does narrative texts. Research indicates that good informational text readers are good fiction readers; however, good fiction readers are not always good at reading informational text.
She claims that she loves to read, but it seems that she doesn't sit down and actually read very often. She likes to do activities with her family, like playing board games, playing video games, or watching movies. I gathered from her discussion of school that she is part of the RTI program at her school. She describes reading class as mostly reading from packets of information and playing games like Jeopardy. When asked what a good reader does, she was able to describe a list of good reader strategies with cute names like "Stretchy the Snake," in which students cover up a word that they don't know and sound it out as they reveal it letter by letter, and "Hoppy the Frog," in which they cover up the word, skip over it, and try to figure out a word that makes sense.
It would be great to get Kashijion into a text with a bit more meat to it. I don't know how her school promotes reading, so will not make assumptions as to whether or not she is reading books of interest or interesting books. Regardless, I would try to supplement her reading with additional texts of interest. It would be great if she could spend some time reading at home. It would be great if she gets hooked in books. Research indicates that just 10 minutes of additional reading at home/day makes a difference (Richard Anderson).
The first thing that she mentioned when describing a good reader, however, was that good readers knew every word on the page that they were reading. I asked her for an example of someone who was a good reader in her class, and then I asked if that person knew every word when they were reading. She agreed that they didn't have to know every single word to be a good reader, but she still placed a lot of emphasis on knowing how to read phonetically and "spell right." She said that she absolutely loved language arts last year when she was in third grade because they learned about the parts of speech. She loves learning about words, and the one thing that she said she wanted to work on in tutoring was learning more "big words." She was very adamant that if we do anything over the course of this semester, she wants to expand her vocabulary. I am thinking that it may be a fun lesson to work with prefixes, suffixes, or word roots, because I think that would be something in which she would be very interested.
Bridget, this is a great idea!! Another suggestion would be to create word cards. When she reads a word that is new in her vocabulary, she can write down the word on an index card. On the reverse side she can record the meaning and the sentence in which the word was found. For organization purposes, you could hole punch and add these to a ring (I'll supply these). When you meet, you can review the word and if she recalls the meaning and uses it appropriately in a sentence, make a mark on the card. Once she has five marks, she can remove the card adding it to another ring indicative of reaching mastery level of the word.
Additionally, by only adding words as they are discovered through text, this may encourage her to read more. :)
She greatly enjoys poetry and we read some Shel Silverstein poems together. After reading them, she was able to grasp the meaning and the humor in the simple poems. As she was reading, she consciously made sure that what she was reading made sense. She omitted a word in the first poem, and went immediately back to re-read the sentence when she realized that it didn't sound right.
Overall, I look forward to working with Kashijion and I think we'll be having a lot of fun this semester! Excellent!!! :)
Tutoring Session #2: Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Pre-Tutoring Technology Reflection: Today, I will probably be using an interactive online activity with my student called "President for a Day," courtesy of PBS Kids. Because Kashijion wants to run for class president next year, I thought it would fun to use this semester honing in on the literate activities that presidents (of countries, teams, or even student council) use as they go about their duties. I hope the "President for a Day" activity would be a fun way to get Kashijion thinking about presidential responsibilities.
REFLECTION:
The one thing that I wanted to do today was record Kashijion's oral reading, so that was what we started with. I let Kashijion peruse the bookshelves until she settled on The Little Piano Girl by Ann Ingalls and Maryann Macdonald. The text seemed to be at a good instructional level (I will probably write more on this once I have completed my running record and analysis). She often looked up at me, expecting me to tell her what a difficult word was. When I encouraged her to read it herself, she always sounded it out. She had named so many different reading strategies the last tutoring session that I was hoping that she would use a few of them during her oral reading, but I was disappointed. After she finished reading, she wanted to hear herself read the whole story again. I told her that we could listen to a part of it. As I began playing back her oral reading, she seemed very disappointed in herself and her reading. So, I paused after she self-corrected herself using her sound-it-out strategy and told her, "Wow! Did you hear that? You're such a clever reader! Did you hear how you figured out that word? That was a smart strategy to use, don't you think?" :)
It is so important that students understand we all make "miscues" when reading. You may want to also share with her how you make miscues and this will happen regardless of how great of a reader we consider ourselves as being.
After that little confidence-booster, she felt much more comfortable with her reading.
From what you shared, it sounds as if she is relying heavily on phonics. Graphophonics should be used as one of her cuing systems, but as you are probably realizing she may need growth in semantics. I would encourage you to pre-read the text and cover words that can easily be predicted with sticky notes (cut out pieces if the font is small). After she provides possible words, you may want to then add the first letter of the word. I would not have the first letter of the word immediately available, because if she is over relying on phonics this may serve as a "bump" in the road, especially since she is a conscientious learner.
Last week, she had enthusiastically told me about her plans to run for class president and student council next year. Tugging on that interest, I told her that we would be learning about what it means to be a president. I told her about my plan for her to write and record herself giving a "State of the Union"-like address. At first, she panicked that she would be "on TV," but when I told her that we could record her voice and put pictures to it (like a photo story), she seemed very excited. After that, we began working on a graffiti board with what a president needs to do and what a president needs to know. She didn't seem to have very many ideas for the duties of a president, so we moved into the computer lab to work on "President for a Day" on the PBS website.
Terrific work at picking up on her interests and tying it into a literacy activity. Kudos to you!
She was excited to use the computer and was engaged in the beginning of the interactive. However, as the interactive went on, she became more fatigued and hungry (it was nearing 7:00 in the evening) Is she eating dinner before she attends tutoring? and stopped trying to make sense of the stories being told. It was a shame, considering that the activities more closely linked with literacy (as opposed to going for a swim and riding in a limousine) were later on. She was eager to read whatever was on the computer, but stopped trying to make sense of what the stories were saying.
I hope she is eating dinner before tutoring. Did you ask her if she had an opportunity to eat beforehand? Yikes, I would be fatigued, too.
As we came to the first page of the game included a lot of information on the requirements to become president of the U.S.A., and she begged me to write these down on her graffiti board. I told her that she didn't have to, but she didn't seem to believe me. I finally asked her, "You know that this isn't homework, right?"
"It isn't?" she replied. I obviously need to be more clear about the purpose of tutoring next session. I think I can also come up with some more engaging activities that will keep her more fully involved throughout the full hour.
Sounds like you are doing a great job, so far. Also, please know you can get up and walk to the drinking fountain for a break.
Tutoring Session #3: Tuesday, March 1, 2011
The one thing that Kashijion said that she wanted to learn in our session was "big words." I had written in my first reflection that I hoped to do a lesson word roots, and today I followed through. First, I introduced one of my favorite books of all time: Frindle by Andrew Clements. I initially asked Kashijion where she thought words came from and how words came to be. Kashijion said that they came from the dictionary, and I prompted her until, in a flash of realization (as many of her great moments of learning occur!), she admitted that words must be made up by people like herself. Then, we moved on to reading a printed out passage from Clements' website FAQ in which he describes where the idea for Frindle came from. Kashijion got a bit tired reading the text, and we began to switch on and off. But, just as I had noticed during our previous lesson, Kashijion got fatigued and began omitting words and switching up words in ways that didn't make sense. Once we had finished the passage, I asked her questions about what she had read, and she could recite direct pieces of text that I had read aloud, but couldn't remember what she had read. I think that by reading animatedly, I had left more of an impression than what she skimmed over herself.
Then, we moved on to the root words lesson. I showed her the example word "hemisphere." She was so proud of herself that she could tell me that it meant a section of the globe! I asked her how she had known that, and she said that they had talked about it in social studies. I asked her if there was a name for a strategy (like "Hoppy the Frog" or "Stretchy the Snake") in which she looked for smaller words inside other words to figure out what the bigger words meant. Kashijion said that there wasn't, that she had never heard of that strategy before. I have to admit that I was surprised, given all of the different strategies that she had been learning in her reading classes. I then wrote out the word "hemisphere" on my little whiteboard and asked her if she recognized any words inside "hemisphere." Initially, she said no, but then a lightbulb went of and she shouted, "SPHERE!"
"What's that?" I asked.
"My brother learned about that in geometry," she told me, "It's like a circle."
"Ah," I said, "Well, what if I told you that the root 'hemi' means 'half'?"
I wrote out the word "half" under "hemi" and "circle" under "sphere."
"Half circle... Half a circle... OH!" she smiled, "The word 'hemisphere' means 'half a circle!'"
She was hooked. She kept begging for harder and harder words. I showed her some words that had Latin roots and explained what they meant. For example, I used "telephone." I had her draw a line where she thought there were two distinct roots, and she split it between "tele" and "phone". She postulated guesses as to what the two roots meant, sounding it out and trying out different meanings. I eventually told her that "tele" meant distance and "phone" meant sound. I then asked her what she thought "phonics" meant, armed with this new information.
We went on like this and she eventually started coming up with her own words. Most of them were compound words like "landline" or "earpiece," and I mentioned that those were known as "compound words" but didn't press the distinction. Her eagerness for breaking up words was not to be hampered. I think that revisiting root words and compound words in a later lesson would be useful, if only just to reinforce the action of breaking apart words and looking for meaning to steer her away from just pure graphophonic reliance. Besides, she liked it!
Tutoring Session #4: Tuesday, March 15, 2011
This lesson, we focused on prediction. I started out by asking Kashijion if she ever predicts while she's reading. She said that she does in school, that her class makes predictions as a class when they were reading something together. She told me that she never predicts as she is reading, though. She does have a strategy called "Hoppy the Frog," in which she skips over the word and comes back to it after she is finished with the sentence or the section. Although she seems to understand this strategy in theory, she does not seem to employ it in her oral reading. This is something that I hope to work on in future tutoring sessions.
For this session, I had printed out a list of first lines from different books, without the book titles. I had her read each of them and predict what was going on in the story and what was going to happen next. From each sentence, we tried to answer the questions, "What kind of story is this?" "What does this sentence tell us about the story, characters, and/or setting?" and "How does this sentence make you feel?" The answers to these questions offered us a plethora of knowledge about what the stories may be about.
For example, when she read,
"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin,"
Upon reading this, Kashijion stated, "It's a baby book!" When I asked her how she knew that, she described to me that the "bump, bump, bump" rhythm was often found in children's picture books. She also noted the presence of Edward Bear who, she assumed, was a teddy bear simply because one man cannot carry a bear down stairs. She predicted that Edward Bear, real bear or not, would have a serious headache after being dragged down the stairs in such a manner. She predicted that the story would center around the characters of Christopher Robin and Edward Bear, and was very surprised to hear that "Edward Bear" was, in fact, "Winnie-the-Pooh," but she immediately recalled who Christopher Robin was. For each sentence, she was surprised at how much information she could draw out of the story, and I was surprised at how lively and engaging was her imagination. She had me in stitches!
The rest of the sentences went in a similar manner to the first line of A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, but the one line that really caught her interest was the first line of The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi:
"Not every thirteen-year-old girl is accused of murder, brought to trial, and found guilty. But I was just such a girl, and my story is worth relating even if it did happen years ago.”
She assured me, time and time again, that she would have to go out and look for the book. I was very disappointed with myself for putting an intriguing line on the list that was at a much higher reading level than her own. That being said, I am thrilled that she was so engaged by the sentence that she was ready to head to the library straight after our tutoring session (which, I do think, is much more important than finding an "appropriate reading level" for her).
At the end of our decoding and deciphering session, we did a quick 5-minute drawing activity (don't worry just yet, Natalie, the rationale will follow!). We did an activity known in art classes as an "exquisite corpse" in which one person draws a head, another person draws a body, and yet another person draws the legs of one creature on a sheet of paper without seeing any of the other people's work. Kashijion and I just swapped two pieces of paper (she drew head, I drew body, she drew legs). The reason behind this was to harness this creativity that I had noticed bubble up throughout the lesson. For our next session, we will begin a sort of storytelling in which we incorporate the "exquisite corpse" format. Kashijion will write a few sentences about something that is happening to a character. I, seeing only the last line, will continue the story. The next week, Kashijion will continue the story with only the last line that I had written as a reference. I think that this will be a fun writing activity because the format of it keeps it interesting and engaging, and the outcome will probably turn out a bit wacky. The wilder the events, the more outlandish the vocabulary, the better. I assured her that I didn't care about spelling or neatness of handwriting. All I want is to read a really interesting story.
She assured me that she would most definitely deliver :)