On Wednesday, (2/22), I met again with Da-som, but this time for 2 hours! For the first half hour, we worked on correcting a summary of an email from the FSU president regarding President Trump's new immigration policy. She had great ideas, but several grammar mistakes, and some things were generally unclear. As I learned, you don't want to correct students outright. Instead, you want to give them hints and help them learn to self correct. We went through it paragraph by paragraph, and I would circle the areas that need attention. She made some systematic verb tense errors, left out articles where needed, and needed to add the occasional preposition. What I should have done was help her correct the first one, and then have her check the rest of the summary to see if she could find another area where that mistake was make so she could self-correct. I will do this next time. Anyway, we did that. Another thing that needed attention was helping her differentiate between the US President and the FSU President in her writing. Other than that, she adeptly summarized the main ideas of the email.
I decided to give her a test run of the Mardi Gras lesson I had planned for my student teaching the following day. To build schema, I went over some vocabulary such as "parade, costume, and masquerade." She knew the meaning of most of those words, but we worked together to help her verbally articulate the ideas in English. I then showed a National Geographic video on Mardi Gras. The video is very PG, whereas Mardi Gras itself is absolutely not. I instructed her to take notes on the important ideas! The video went over Floats, Costumes, King Cake, Parades, Krewes and Music. She understood most of it, as evidenced by a short verbal quiz I gave her with diverse types of comprehension questions. Next I gave her a worksheet with a reading on Mardi Gras, broken up with blanks above each paragraph. Her task was to read the paragraph, and then come up with a short title for the paragraph. I modeled the first paragraph, and she understood the task. She struggled a little bit, but did well! The next task was to use context clues to define words I had underlined, such as "hallmark" and "stunning." Getting through the whole Mardi Gras lesson took an hour and a half, but she seemed to have fun doing it!
It was a challenging lesson, but she got through it!!
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