Making Things Up

Today Gerardo only wanted to work on his writing. Since he did not bring another children's book, he told me to read from one of my books. All I had was my French notebook and a Shakespeare play, so I improvised and told him a fairy tale that was sort of based on a few of Shakespeare's plays, though in words I knew he would understand. And since I could not have him check his work like last time, as I did not have a hard copy for him to refer to, I looked over it and explained his mistakes to him as we went along. I then asked if he brought his verb workbook and he said no, so I did another dictating exercise. I told him that I would either say a statement or a question and he would have to write them down. They were all unrelated and I thought of them as I went along. I asked questions with words that I knew he had had trouble with in the past to help him improve even more, such as the word evening, which he spells iving, so I asked What are you doing this evening? This was a great exercise because he often has trouble knowing if something is a question or a statement when he hears it, so this helped with that and he ended all of them with the correct punctuation, which he was really excited about. After twenty-something questions, I again reviewed them with him and afterward we still had time, so I made up another story about people preparing dinner on the weekend. We had a lot of progress this week because he had a lot of questions about words that he was confused about and I think he is improving a lot with what we have worked on in past sessions. One of the things he has had trouble with is the spelling of when as wen and while as wile, though he did not understand what these meant. I used the example of When I left today, you were not at home and While I was gone, you came home, emphasizing that when is a time period whereas while means during something. So today was a productive session. We discussed other meeting times for the week of Thanksgiving and the week after when I will not be able to make our session because of a doctor's appointment. We are scheduled to meet on Monday of those weeks at the same time. I'm glad the timing worked out because I feel that it is extremely important for us to meet every week and make it up if we miss a session. Practice, practice, practice....