On Tuesday, 2/14, shortly after I met with Aeyil, I tutored her 4-year old son, Matt for the first time. He's a delightful young boy, and this meeting was a diagnostic session. The first order of business was getting Matt to warm up to me. I tried to be really smiley and high-energy, and that seemed to work. To see where he was at, I had him name some colors. He did that so easily, so we moved onto animals. He knew those too, but would only speak in one-word sentences. That activity was clearly too easy for him, so my next goal was to get him to speak in full sentences. I would ask him this-or-that questions about the animals. For example, "Are turtles slow or fast?" Or "do turtles live in the ocean or on land?" He knew the answers, and the next task was to string the words he came up with on his own together into a full sentence. Eventually, with each animal we discussed, he could say a whole sentence such as "Turtles are green and slow." He grew weary of that exercise, so next to check his reading comprehension, I read a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle book to him that Aeyil brought for me. I think he was either too shy or too unconfident to read, so I turned the reading into a bit of a TPR exercise. For example, I would point to the word jump and he would act it out. This took up the rest of the hour, but at the end it seemed that Matt really warmed up to me and had fun!
As far as his English language capabilities go, I'm certain that he understands almost everything. He has an incredible receptive vocabulary, but is currently unable/reluctant to efficiently use productive vocabulary. Next time, I plan to have some cards written out for him to make sentences with!
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