"I Love You"

 I was tutoring the three-year-old girl I work with yesterday, and we were going through our usual routine of "games" (so they seem to her) teaching her the letters of the alphabet. I was surprised when, out of the blue, she turned to me and said "I love you." It really surprised me! She is so sweet and innocent! Funny, too. Whenever I come to the door, she runs to it shouting, "tutor Tia's here!" She also usually asks me if I have any "canny" (candy), since I give a piece to my students for work well done, with a good attitude. 

I can usually only keep her attention for about half an hour, but yesterday we went for an hour! I added some activities, particularly tracing lines and shapes in a dry-erase picture book. As long as I have each learning activity seem like a game, she'll keep at it. She's even learning how to write her name. I always hold her hand, having her hold the pencil correctly, and explain what we're doing step-by-step as I guide her hand in writing the letters in her name, R-U-B-Y. Yesterday I did our ususal routine, then tried having her write the letters completely on her own. It wasn't too bad! I could sort of read the letters, knowing what she was intending to write. She's progressing very well! I hope I can be her tutor over the next few years and see what advancements she makes!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Starting High School!

 Okay, so this boy isn't one that I actually tutor. He's autistic, and I just make sure he gets up in time for school and make him breakfast, then take him to school. Today is his first day of high school!  I asked him if he was excited about starting high school, and he said no. I asked him if he was nervous, but the thing he was worried about was that he wouldn't see any of his middle school teachers anymore. And he had a new class schedule to learn, and wasn't sure he would know where each class was, and how to get there on time.  I told him to just check in the office if he didn't know where to go next. I remember starting high school, even though it was so long ago. It took me about a week to feel confident about knowing my schedule and where my classrooms were.  I'm sure he'll do fine once he adjusts to a new school. He did fine remembering his schedule at the middle school, and this will be the same way. I was surprised this morning that he got up bef...
Read more

Subbing at elementary schools!

Image
 In addition to being a tutor, I'm also a substitute paraeducator for elementary schools, and I've done it eight times now! I really enjoy it! The only thing that's difficult is navigating my way around the myriad of hallways. I've been a recess overseer, a lunch room overseer, and watched the kids while they were in line waiting for the buses to arrive. But the best part is when I get to work in the classrooms! For one teacher, I got the cardboard dividers off the shelf and set one on each desk, then made sure each desk had a sheet of notebook paper and a sheet of graphing paper and a pencil. This was all before the kids arrived. I've also done timed reading with different classes, one method being to see how many words a kindergartener can read in one minute, marking the words they read wrong, and another method where the kids in 1st grade had to read a one-page story and time them to see how long it took them, marking any words they mispronounced. I've done m...
Read more

Vowel Sounds

Image
My first post for April!  The six-year-old girl I've been working with has been learning to read blends and doing so well! Bl, tr, st, ch...  But she's started to get confused about what sounds the vowels make. So I've decided to take a break from her workbook and go back over the sounds of A,E,I,O,U. I have special lined paper in a book for young writers, and I wrote the vowels across the top of a two-page spread with lines representing columns. Then I would say a word with a vowel sound in it, like "cat," for example. Then she would need to recognize which vowel sound she was hearing, and write the word under the correct letter. (A)  I used some really easy words like bat, sit, had, dog, cup, etc. but I also included some of the newer words she's been learning, like play, trip, chug, and so on. She did okay, but she really had to think about the sounds. So I'm going to be working on the vowel sounds with her over the next couple of weeks (I tutor her onc...
Read more