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Valerie TS #3

Today, January 28, 2019, from 10 to 11:07 am, I tutored Marcelle at Gilchrest Elementary. In class she had been working on grouping words together based on the vowel sound they make, so I took the green papers with the words she had been arranging with me to the library. I wanted her to practice letter recognition since she doesn't know how to read any of them and I want her to learn how to read and not just memorize the words. I decided to just do the first five letters of the alphabet for today to not overwhelm her. We sung the ABCs together, then I pointed to a letter, stated what the letter was called, made the sound it makes, and then told her to point to all of the same letters she could find. She would repeat after me and then point to each letter. She got confused a few times with a and e but she was able to recognize the correct letter most of the time. Next we moved on to flashcards again and I taught her words about royalty such as crown, king, and queen. The last activity we did was read the French-English picture dictionary again, but this time I quickly went through some of the pages we had already read to see if she remembered any of the words, and then I went over a few new pages. I am going to continue with this tactic following the rest of the book because this way the words we have previously gone over will eventually become ingrained in her long-term memory. Before I left the school, I asked the teacher if I could start using basic worksheets with Marcelle so that she could practice writing the letters. She told me she would go to the Kindergarten classroom to take some worksheets and make copies for our next tutoring session. I look forward to seeing Marcelle write for the first time, because writing in addition to pointing to the letters will allow her to properly learn them and eventually start reading.

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