Starting Early
Julius, Age 11
When informed of the possibility that my oldest nephew Julius might be held back in the second grade my sister approached me and asked for my help in tutoring him. Of course my nephews mean the world to me so despite my little knowledge of teaching with only a semester of English courses under my belt I took on the role of his tutor. Elementary education is not my area of study but the knowledge I had gained from taking education 2000 gave me a boost in approaching this task. Julius's main problem was reading and understanding that what he was reading. he could read the words and knew what the story meant but he could not tell his teacher what he had read.
Julius was a smart boy and he just needed to figure out how to put his thoughts together. His sentences were short and lacked the important factors to make a sentence work together. To combat this I treated his sentence making skills like a game. Most of his problem dealt with understanding clauses. Example: When the Lions are playing, the stadium is full. Julius would write this but without a proper ending to his sentences. By asking him to remember his thought process as her wrote what he saw I was able to combat is inability o understand the importance of the clause when writing sentences. He was still held back because of other subjects but at least he was able to make progress and that makes me feel like we accomplished a lot.So what i learned is that it's not really about fixing the outcome but tackling the problem.
Julius was a smart boy and he just needed to figure out how to put his thoughts together. His sentences were short and lacked the important factors to make a sentence work together. To combat this I treated his sentence making skills like a game. Most of his problem dealt with understanding clauses. Example: When the Lions are playing, the stadium is full. Julius would write this but without a proper ending to his sentences. By asking him to remember his thought process as her wrote what he saw I was able to combat is inability o understand the importance of the clause when writing sentences. He was still held back because of other subjects but at least he was able to make progress and that makes me feel like we accomplished a lot.So what i learned is that it's not really about fixing the outcome but tackling the problem.