FSU TEFL Certificate Course Spring 2019

This weekend I not only met with my conversation partner, but also met with another CIES student from China, Minjie. She and I talked for hours about her life in China, her job with little kindergarteners in Shanghai, her 7 year long distance relationship with her now husband, her parents and their prejudice towards her husband due to the fact that he is from Hong Kong, her wedding and their future plans as a couple!! I was so ecstatic to learn this much about the Chinese culture through her and all her stories, she had so much to share about her life and her opinions about Chinese and American culture. Towards the end of the night, she even let my try on two of her traditional Chinese dress wear from the Qing and Zhang dynasty, it was such an honoring and amazing experience!!! I learned so much about Chinese culture and am really motivated to learn Mandarin and visit China while I am abroad:)

This weekend I hung out with Ran and other CIES students to have a traditional Chinese meal. We all made rice bowls and talked about certain customs in China that differ from those in America. In China, rice bowls are usually sweeter and eaten either for breakfast or before dinner, and are left in a large pot of water after being steamed, so that the whole family can sit around the pot and communally eat them together. It is a traditional food usually eaten during the Chinese New Year or other holidays. In China, when you go over a friend's house for dinner, it is expected that you bring something to drink or to eat, but the hosts' will usually prepare a plethora of food for the guests. We ate everything from chips to edamame to rice bowls to steamed broccoli to coconut cake and a soufflé!! And after we left, the hosts' insisted that they didn't need any help cleaning up and that they would do it all! How friendly and selfless of them:)

I just finished my sixth conversation session with DJ today through Skype in my bedroom and it lasted an hour, 28 minutes, and 35 seconds, from 8:16 to 9:44 PM. We talked about Korea's military service, what guilty pleasure means, movies we like, why certain countries like a movie while in other countries it is not that popular, Korean dramas, how education and success is viewed in South Korea and in America, and beliefs about other planets. I love talking to DJ so I told him if he wants to we can keep talking through Skype once a week. He really appreciates it so I will be speaking with him again once a week until he no longer wants to.

Yesterday on February 21, 2019 from 8 to 10:15 pm at Bento's Sushi and Grill, I had my sixth and last tutoring session with Mohammed. We went over the remaining vocabulary words from the context clues worksheet and then ate sushi. Then he asked me questions again about culture and beliefs so we had another interesting conversation. In the end he thanked me so much for everything I had done with him and told me I was a good tutor. I gave him the website were I had gotten some of the worksheets from and told him he could continue practicing his reading skills there.

On Wednesday, February 20 th , I met with Yahyia at CIES at 12:00.   He wanted to go over noun clauses and adjective clauses. He already had a grammar exam this week that included questions on noun and adjective clauses, but he just wanted to go over them again with me since he was not feeling completely confident in his answers for the test.   Yahyia had a good understanding of non-defining adjective clauses and was able to successfully identify and create them.   However, he would get a bit confused on defining adjective clauses, so I explained the differences between the two and how to identify a sentence for a defining adjective clause. When we finished going over what he needed clarification on, he helped me to refresh my memory on Arabic letters and sounds since we still had some time left until he had to go to his next class. Yahyia has made a lot of progress throughout the last few weeks and I look forwards to our future tutoring sessions dur...

Today, February 20, 2019, I tutored Marcelle for the last time at Gilchrist Elementary from 10 till 11:10 am. In class she was going over grouping words with the same sounds together, so she brought her slips of paper with the words and we worked on grouping them in the library. Then she wrote a few of them on the board and I pointed to each letter so she could tell me what they are called. I went over the sound certain letters make together ans she was able to read a few words. In the end, she finished the three tracing worksheets, front and back, for the remaining letters U, V, W, X, Y, and Z.

On Monday, February 18 th , I met with Yahyia at CIES at 12:00.   He wanted to go over a reading passage that he needed to write a summary about.   He understood all of the main points of the passage, but just needed some help with certain vocabulary words.   Words included in the passage attuned, fraught, fixated, and obsessed.   I helped him figure out what the words could mean by using context clues from the sentence, which helped him.   Afterwards, I gave him synonyms for each word and would use the words in a sentence so that he could get an even better understanding.   Afterwards, I helped him write a short summary, but he seemed to have a good understanding of what to do for this and did not really need that much help.   When we were done, I told him to come up with at least two or three sentences for each vocabulary word so that he could get extra practice.