Ben - TP#5

Today I had my first tutoring session with Jun-sung, but he likes to go by Jason. Jason is a third grader from South Korea who I found to be actually quite skilled at speaking and communicating in English. Most of this first session was spent getting to know Jason and working out areas that he wants to work on, or more accurately areas of study that he is most interested in. This area proved to be reading. Jason is quite passionate about reading. At first he was a little shy when we started talking to each other, but after the subject of reading was introduced into the conversation, Jason was an open book (pun most assuredly intended). In fact most of our session was spent making a reading list together, gathering books, suggesting books for him to read, and even reading a little bit towards the end of the session. Jason has an affinity for animals and sports he explained, but his favorite series of books are the Ready Freddy books. I had never heard of these before, but after some investigating it became apparent that there is a seemingly endless amount of these books, and Jason is serious about reading all of them. Oh, it should be noted that our tutoring session was at Leon Public Library because this allowed for some serious book searching. Before we got into book searching though we went over a list of Jason's favorite animals and sports. I've found this introduction to tutoring very helpful both with Jason and with Fumie. Discovering things that the student is interested in makes it infinitely easier to teach the student other concepts through these subject areas. That's why I think it is vital to find out favorite books, movies, animals, subjects, etc. Now I can create lesson plans, and create units of study that are actually interesting to the student. Grammar, writing, speaking, vocabulary; these are all things that I can incorporate naturally.
Such was the way of this first session with Jason. We tracked down a huge amount of Ready Freddy books, some books on wolves and sharks, and I got a Calvin and Hobbes book for him to check out (because he said his favorite animal is a tiger and I love Calvin and Hobbes). Then we spent a while reading passages out of the Ready Freddy books and talking about their overall meaning. It was a great way to go over concepts and ideas, and Jason had a lot to say about everything we read. By the end of the session, Jason seemed like he did not want to leave actually, he was having a great time reading the books. I gave him the assignment of reading one of the Ready Freddy books for next week and writing a short summary of what happened in the book. I also told him to write down any vocabulary words he did not know so we can go over them next session. I'm fairly confident he is going to do the homework I assigned to him, he really loves these books. I very much enjoyed my first tutoring session with Jason and look forward to our next one. He seems to have a passion for reading and a thirst for knowledge so I need to be on top of my tutor game to keep up.