On February 4th, 2017 Laura and I had our first tutoring session with the child refugees. Although the father did not know that we were coming, after we explained ourselves he let us in. We ended up just working with all of the children, and Laura took the older boy separately because he was at a higher level than his siblings. I worked with the three other children, all of which ranged from kindergarten to 2nd grade. The only prior English that I could see that they had was in answering their names, and saying when they had to go to the restroom. We begun by looking at an alphabet book and writing the letters on small cards, and I realized that they were proficient at writing and adequate at sounding out written words.
I had brought construction paper, and so I decided to teach the different colors. I wrote the word of the color on each sheet of paper, and went over each color. Next, I found items around the room of certain colors and asked where the object goes. They did not understand "Where?" or the hand gesture that I made with the word, and so I sampled with a few objects. They quickly caught on, and ended up finding objects themselves to put in the correct category. They knew a few of the objects' names such as "ball" and "shoe", and so I practiced putting the object name and color together in a sentence. For example, I would pick up the shoe and say "The shoe is blue" pointing to the corresponding color.
I was surprised at how little English the children knew, yet they still attended school with all of their classes in English. I am looking forward to seeing how they progress within the next sessions.
No comments:
Post a Comment