TP #5 Jude

Today I had my second tutoring session with my child tutee, P.J.  We started a little slow at the beginning of the session because I think we were both tired, but as soon as we got more and more into the reading focus on the material grew. Today's lesson focused on reading comprehension and reading to understand. In order to do so, we utilized the stories in highlights magazine.

It is difficult to maintain focus when it's early in the day (especially with a child tutee), so I went through the magazine in order to find a story that P.J. would find interesting. I was lucky enough to find a semi-interesting story about moose tracking in Canada which I think caught both our interest and I went about creating reading comprehension questions as we went on.

I think the problem with reading comprehension (especially with child tutees) is finding that particular student's prior knowledge +1. While reading the story, I would stop P.J. after about three paragraphs and ask him a question about what he had just read. He was very good at answering these questions, but when I asked questions after reading an entire passage, the answers were much more difficult to get. This is a task I feel will come with time, and my ability to come up with more effective reading comprehension questions is something I want to work on.