Make-Up Session: Check!

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This week started with uncertainty. My student was a no-show, my phone calls to his mother weren't answered and neither were the emails I sent. I decided to make a home visit and found my student there, but not his mother. Thankfully big sister called mom, and I was allowed to pick and drop him home for his make-up session. I'm glad I hung in there, I really thought that they didn't want to participate anymore, but I'm grateful that I was able to reach out to his mother and that everything turned out fine! I just reminded him about Thursdays' session! Can't wait to see Team MAGEC and all our students!

Stuff it in, and back it up.

I always have trouble remembering three things: faces, names, and - I can't remember what the third thing is.
Fred Allen

Today was really great. My student read with more expression than he had before, and I could sense him changing his voice for the different characters of the play. When it was his turn to read the part of the reporter, he lowered his voice, and when it was time for the tough guy part, he got a little tougher. Excellent! However, I was surprised when he had not heard of Einstein! This simply reaffirms that I need to put as much information in his head as I possibly can! I need to stuff it in, back it up, and make the experience memorable so the ideas and information stick. I might come up with some follow up tests for him for the car ride over! That's 35 valuable minutes.;) Anyway, overall I am happy with my student's performance, he never seems terribly happy to be going to the lab, but he seems happy while he is reading. He certainly delights in correctly answering questions and remember information. Back to the schema.

Quote Citation: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/remembering.html

Image Citation:http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/chimpanzee_thinking_poster.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/breakthrough_thinking/index.shtml&usg=__AnjS35RG18xZSU0F-MWm-8R3L9o=&h=383&w=299&sz=18&hl=en&start=0&sig2=mjUbr9VVdyPWrBndHMrB3w&zoom=1&tbnid=FAWNwV6wEUnXPM:&tbnh=153&tbnw=117&ei=zWJBTfq1A4y2sAPm_7GWCg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dthinking%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26sa%3DX%26rls%3Den%26biw%3D1196%26bih%3D668%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=128&vpy=93&dur=3290&hovh=254&hovw=198&tx=144&ty=170&oei=zWJBTfq1A4y2sAPm_7GWCg&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0

Learning in More Ways than One

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
Marvin Minsky

Today's session proved to be one of those days where my many years of teaching experience didn't provide me the assurance that my session would go smoothly. While last week's was awesome, this time around my student struggled with the basic letter-sound recognition that the majority of fourth grade students take for granted. And because my training and instinct kicked in, as an educator I knew better than to feel frustrated with the lack of this simple task by my student. But, who was I kidding? I am only human, and frustration is a human emotion, so there, I've put it out there for my MAGEC team to comment on. Don't worry, I won't get offended should you decide to give me a piece of advice; I promise.

But, just the same way that I wasn't too thrilled about today's session, like the true professional that I am (I think!), I'll pick up the "pieces" and get back on my feet, and do what I know best to help my student progress, and that's to TEACH! After all, as teachers, we all know that there is more than one way that a child can learn; so if he can't learn through a certain way, then I'll try other ways.

Quote: http://www.quotegarden.com/learning.html

Image: blog.iqmatrix.com

"I can make it through the rain"

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."
-Dolly Parton

What a long day it has been. I'm starting to get the flu symptoms and my body is giving me signals that I need some rest. The weather has been unpredictable lately and sure enough, I got caught in the rain. However, that did not interfere with my motivation to continue with the strategies and activities for today's session. K.T. needs to hear the encouragement in my voice telling her that she is making progress. She enjoys the praises and incentives. I give her so much credit for having all the energy despite a long day for her too. When I see the enthusiasm in her, it pushes me to keep going even when feeling weak. My biggest reward is if in the end, she will be able to read with confidence and be proud of herself for how far she has come. After all the courses we have taken, there is a better understanding of how to apply these strategies with actual students who need the assistance.

Image courtesy of: http://rookery9.aviary.com.s3.amazonaws.com/

One small step followed by another

With each new session, I can see my student's potential just out of reach.  I know he is able to do well, comprehend the stories, and answer the questions but there is just that little problem of a language barrier.  But slowly and surely, I can see gains to use as footholds upward over this mountain.


"Nobody trips over mountains.  It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble.  Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain" (Author unknown, http://www.quotegarden.com/perseverance.html).


Today's time with him was a productive one.  He wrote more than he ever has for me.  The 3-sentence summary, which turned into a nine-sentence summary gave him some needed structure and focus.  He was able to provide more detail in each section (Beginning, Middle, End) without getting overwhelmed with having to retell the whole story.  I think this is going to be the key to helping him do better in school: take it one part at a time.  It's also a lesson for me to focus on each session and not get bogged down with all the rest of what we'll have to do (in this class, our others, at work, and at home--whew!).  Here's to us all staying sane, calm, and collected until May!

taken from http://www.meetbethallen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/persevere-300x253.jpg

No Show

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Oh, no! My student did not show! Make-up session scheduled for next week! The struggles we must go through when our student is out, but we must move forward because the work must continue. Nobody wants to be left behind, and we do our best to keep on top of things, we just have to make sacrifices to succeed. In place of today's session I was able to do two pages of my addendum. I just took the information from the first case study, and with the help of the sample resource I was able to start my addendum. Looking forward to make-up session as well as session three next week!!

Reading Rocky

Mickey: Your nose is broken.
Rocky: How does it look?
Mickey: Ah, it's an improvement.

Today, we started reading the play of "Rocky". He seemed to be enjoying it, and we'll probably finish it next week. I'm going to try to get him to read all of the plays in the book, that could be exciting. My goal is to get him to like reading this semester, it's going to a careful calculation of push and shove, but with the right books and some guidance, I think I can do it. With the other activities he did well also, he was able to use homophones in sentences and come up with words that begin with prefixes. Most importantly though, I'm going to continue working with his brain so that he can make connections in his head with clues in the text. He needs practice answering implicit questions, so my effort for next week will be toward creating implicit questions. We also started reading out of the Guinness Book of World Records about baseball, which is a topic he is interested in. I'm hoping that the conversations we have before and after the reading will help him understand that reading for information can help him gather information and communicated it with other people. So, even though he's missing baseball practice, and his spirit was a little broken, we'll be looking from improvement!

Video Credit :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvEnIkz82A0&feature=related

Quote Credit: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075148/quotes

Past the beginning, we're halfway done!

That was a productive session.  It was a good experience talking with my student without his needing constant translation.  I chalk it up to his predictable growth as he's now been in school and exposed to a primarily English-speaking society for about four months.  He's made more friends and still has the support from home. He tackled our day's tasks as well as he always has.  He's writing more now.  And though that "more" is two sentences more than last time, it's growth and I'll take it!  In his re-readings, he made insertions which made sense and one would expect to read.  The next time he read it aloud in preparation for doing a cloze test on the passage, he made self-corrections and read it as it was written.  We talked about why he may not do as well as his "mainstream" classmates--lack of schema--and ways he can get around that.  He enjoys reading so why not read about things we he enjoys which will 1) help him build up scheme, and 2) help him practice English?  We looked at sources that will also help him with the subjects he's currently studying in school.  All in all, it was a great start!


Going over the schedule for this semester last night, I realized that though ten tutoring sessions is double of last semester and two hours makes it quadruple (or at least it does to this English person) it's going to go by fast.  We're already almost there if we subscribe to this quote by Horace, "He has half the deed done who has made a beginning" (http://www.quotelady.com/subjects/beginnings.html).

from http://static.zooomr.com/images/5741837_161afac3ed.jpg

We're going to have to be more thoughtful and dig down into our knowledge of literacy strategies to help our students succeed.  We've laid out our plans for ourselves and now it's time to follow it.  We know our students by now.  We just have to be patient and flexible when things don't pan out as we'd hope--our reward is waiting just beyond our reach.  Let's keep up our MAGECal support and encouragement of each other.  Let's do this, Team MAGEC!

"There's no stopping now"

"Destiny is not a matter of chance; but a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved." --William Jennings Bryan

Nice to see you all again. Today was another productive day. Fast pace and rewarding. It's nice to see the kids enjoying the one-to-one tutoring. Tried using one of the strategies we had learned in ED645, the Shared Reading Approach. I'm glad our reading lab has a variety of resources including the Big Books. Hope you all enjoyed a well deserved Christmas Break. I guess it's time to get our train going again at full speed. So let's all take a ride and continue through our journey together. Next stop for us, "The road to success!" Once again, good luck to us all. I remember during last semester when we had only hoped to begin using our strategies. Now that we made it this far, there's only one direction and that's straight ahead!

Image courtesy of: http://www.carbuyersnotebook.com/

Let the "MAGEC" Begin!

And where does magic come from? I think that it's in the learning.

Dar Williams

Well, we're back and ready and willing to wave the "magec" wand to create the magic of learning in our students! While I'm sure that everyone in our team really enjoyed the well-deserved Christmas break, we're all pretty anxious to begin the new semester with our plans, tips, and strategies tucked away in our "magecal" hats ready to be implemented at a moment's notice. And, this first session speaks volumes about how we're all raring to perform our magic on our students! Go Team MAGEC!

My student lived up to his "pinky" promise to me today, by trying to do his best in focusing and working with me during our session. Although I'm sure it must have been hard for him to sit still for longer than 20 minutes, we really did accomplish quite a bit for the first day.

After going over the letters and sounds of the alphabet, I read him an alphabet book that had pictures to go with the words of the letters. While this may have been rather elementary for him, I felt that he needed this review of letter-sound recognition since his main weakness is in decoding. We then proceeded to create a word bank and word wall of several sight and high-frequency words. As a culminating activity, he dictated a short story using all these words in which I read to him, and then, he read it back to me. Hopefully, this will prove meaningful to my student, since the story was drawn from his background knowledge.

All in all, today's session went pretty smoothly, and I have confidence that the magic of learning will continue throughout the semester and beyond!

Image: www.magicbob2000.com

quote: www.brainyquotes.com

"We're MAGEC"

Oh, oh, oh! We're "MAGEC" you know...never believe we're not so!!
Welcome team MAGEC to Spring semester! So glad to start the year with the same great team. Today's session with my student went well, he was excited and ready, especiall for the snacks. Thank you all for bringing the snacks. My student enjoyed them. We got alot done, including vowel and consonent sounds as well as paired reading. After his third try, he was able to independently read the book with just 3 mistakes out of 43 words. Looking forward to future sessions!