Carlton TP #15

Sixth tutee session with DH,  American born of Korean parents. Monday, April 14, 6:30-7:30pm

We all meet at the main Library on Park Street. Mrs. H was concerned over poor grades on his classwork for this new week. I mentioned again that they were preparing for testing FCAT next week and there is probably a disrupted class schedule. DH says they have practice in Math this week.

A few weeks ago when we did the new weekly spelling list, he got 100% correct (on a pretest). But this week, his score from the teacher was only 50%, just for spelling. We did some review and there were only a couple of words that seemed really difficult. Most he could figure out using spelling rules he knew.

His handwriting was also worse than I had seen previously. The task was a short paragraph he had written to paraphrase a story. I asked him to rewrite the summary again and we would improve it for sentence structure and neatness. This was relatively easy, even as we discussed in detail: margins, capitalization, line and word spacing, ligatures, erasing. He compared the two versions and agreed that he could do better writing.

For a diversion that would keep him interested, I had prepared a little information lesson on the continuing theme of pirate ships and treasure. I gave him a little information when we needed a break or to entice him back to his work. This time I used a famous Florida discovery, the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha. There is a lot of internet information about this famous treasure, and I had visited the museum in Key West, so I could speak personally about it. In the past weeks, he has always lit up when we talked about this subject, and I can introduce a little American history instead of trying to relate to cartoon fantasy characters.