New Focus

Elodia called me the week before spring break to cancel our session. She said she was feeling overwhelmed and wanted to take an ESL class because she didn't understand a lot of the homework and was struggling. I was confused because I thought she was doing well in our meetings. I told her to call me if she changed her mind and I would gladly help her. I called her last Wednesday, and spoke to her after having the week of break to let her think, and said we could put off working on the GED and just work on English. She said that would be good and we met at our usual time on Thursday. I didn't use the GED book because I knew some of the activities were too advanced, so I found verb and pronoun handouts online that had a piece of the sentence missing and multiple choice answers with what should go in the blank. There were questions with different verb tenses and some with pronouns that I thought would give me an idea of where to begin with grammar. First, we spoke about what she wanted to work on and she said writing and grammar since she could read better than she could write. Then we worked on the handouts and made it through 11 of the pages. She had some difficulty, but I explained the ones she struggled with. She was confused on questions with contractions in them. I explained that don't was do not put together and we talked about other contractions for a bit and I told her I would bring an activity and a more in-depth explanation of them next week.  At the closing of the session, I asked what she wanted to focus on in the coming weeks and I asked her how hard she thought the activity we'd worked on was for her. She said it was of medium difficulty and that she wanted to work more on verb tenses and pronouns. I said I'd bring other activities next week and we'd take things week by week, working on what she thought she needed to work on. I told her to write a few paragraphs about a favorite something, like a favorite pet, toy, vacation, ect., that she had in the past since she was struggling with most of the past tense questions in the activity we'd just done. She said she would write something and bring it next week. I think this meeting went well because we slowed down and focused on some trouble areas today. I hadn't realized she was so confused with the activities from the GED book, so I'm glad she said something and we are able to just focus on English for now.