We restarted lessons with Kasser. After a two month break (the June holidays saw us not having any lessons at all, and then we were away, followed by a period of self-quarantine due to the H1N1 outbreak and so on... then followed by another postponing of the first lesson due to my falling down and spraining my foot very badly), we finally restarted lessons in August. His mother had not been able to get a job, but I managed to convince them to let me come and give him lessons for free... so happily, I was able to continue where we left off.
As expected, he had forgotten quite a bit of his work... we had to revisit the sounds and the rules... and we had to revisit the concepts of "word", "syllable", "sound" and "letter" and so on...
But as of right now, I'm slowing lessons down a great deal now that he is doing the vowel pairs and he is getting quite confused by the many ways to spell the different long vowel sounds... to add to the problem, he has a very poor vocabulary... so not only does he have to tackle homophones and homonyms (words that sound the same and are spelt different), he has to learn the meanings of those words at the same time. And this has proven to be a very great hurdle for him. Even basic words that I expected him to know, he didn't know... and we are talking about a child who is already in the 2nd half of Primary Two!
I've also started integrating grammar and comprehension out of sheer necessity - and to my horror, he has no concept of singular/plural, subject-verb agreement and tenses... all basic stuff! So there has been a lot of work done with that as well, which also then slows down the progress of the OG lessons... sigh. But now that he no longer has 1-1 tuition for English, I feel like I have to help him in that area as well... because while the OG helps him with spelling and reading specifically, it's in a way useless because the language is, a large part, dead... since he doesn't know so many words... argh! And his sentence structures are so weird... he has no idea when to use present/past/continuous tense... never mind the perfect tense and so on! Oh dear... how am I going to help this boy?!
I only realised the depth of his problems when I had set him some basic grammar work to do... In one sentence, he had chosen a word marked for past tense as the answer, which happened to be correct. But when I asked him why it was the word marked for past tense, and not the one marked for present tense, he explained that the word marked for past tense was used for animals, while the one marked for present tense was used for people... how he got that idea, I will never know!
So lessons are going ahead at a snail's pace... while I was doing one new sound every lesson before the long break, right now, we are only managing one new sound every three lessons or so... with a whole bunch of other more "urgent" lessons weaved in, in an effort to bring up his grades for the coming end of year exams. I just hope that this will be enough.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment