Change for Kids

On Monday, I reviewed lists of sight words with my two tutees. They were generally able to recognize the words that they should know at their grade level. One problem I noticed though, however, is that they wanted to jump into saying the words out loud right away before properly pronouncing them out. I found that I had to constantly reinforce pronunciations of the different letters with them. After I finished the sight words with them, I read them books. These, however, were not just any reading books, which could get long and complicated. These were small reading books published by Scholastic. The benefits of reading these to them are that they are short to read, and the same two or more words are repeated over and over again. This is an excellent learning tool since my tutees would be able to recognize them much more easier if they have seen the same word for two or more times. Lastly, I worked with them on writing their own individual summaries of the book and what they enjoyed most about it. Before I left, the literary resource teacher went over with me new activities to engage the students in for my next tutoring session. She described one game that I can play with them, where words are written on index cards and are flipped over on the table. Each word in the pile has a double. The objective is for the student to be able to flip over a card and to be able to recognize it right away and to associate it as the missing one in the pair of the word he has on hand. This sounds like an interesting game! I look forward to my next tutoring session when I can actually utilize this method. Well, of course, the students will look forward to each tutoring session if there are interesting activities in store for them each time!

So this semester at PS 160 has been a HUGE improvement over the Fall semester. Instead of working with random kids, I was assigned four children. What we usually do is read passages out loud and solve word problems. 3 out of the 4 kids I work with need A LOT of help. But the fourth child is amazingly great at reading. So great that after class I asked Ms. Jenkins (the teacher) why she was chosen to work with me. The teacher said she just came from Bangladesh and did not speak or read English at all last year. I was so shocked because her reading skills are flawless. Ms. Jenkins also said that the little girl lacked confidence to even read in front of the class. This shocked me even more because she’s always asking me to read out loud and when the other kids need help she is my little helper. So it’s great to know that in some way I’m helping her overcome her shyness.
With the other three kids, I think it may be best to help them individually. They are really struggling and I think it makes it worse when other kids are there because they begin to feel pressured to read the passage perfectly. So I’m going to talk Ms. Jenkins about making it one-on-one, and if that’s not possible, two-on-two will have to do.
Also, it should be noted that this is a different class I’m working with from last semester. I actually visited the old class that I worked with last year and most of them remembered me, so that was nice because kids usually have very flighty memories.