I was tutoring a grade 10 student in order to prepare him for his Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT). This is a standardized test which all Ontario students are expected to excel in. Meeting him on a weekly basis for 2 hours was definitely a different experience than being his school teacher. It gave me less time to get to know  and assist the student. Yet, I felt that I learned how to organize my tutoring sessions so that it would be most beneficial for the student.

Researching was my first step as I collected examples, information, marking criteria, past and student (graded) examples. I went through through all the sheets of papers and planned out how I would tutor this student. I personally felt a step-by-step process worked best.

 For example, we worked on perfecting his News Report Writing:

1. Important Terms Activity: Defined all the terms in a news report (headline, byline, placeline, body, facts, and quotations)
2. Identification Activity: Looked at various newspaper articles - identified the sections listed above and filled them in a chart
3. Mix and Match Activity: Put together pieces of cut up news paper articles in a sequential manner
4. Comparison Activity: Read three types of news report written by past students who received different grades in order to understand the quality of an excellent news report
5. Do-it-Yourself Activity: Gave two types of New Reports topics (first which the student connected with, one which was not of the student's interest)

We also worked on essay writing by first working on how to come up with three major ideas to support your argument, followed by how to use the hamburger paragraph model, to finally writing a few essays. 

Le français

Teaching French to a Kindergarten class was great fun! It was their first exposure to French. It was  splendid to hear  the children run up to me and ask me, ‘are we going to learn French today?’ It was such a great feeling when the students were excited and were waiting to learn. I taught them French through simple themes, such as  les couleurs (colours), les numeros (numbers), les fruits et les légumes (fruits and vegetables). They learned through listening and repeating words, playing with different objects/toys laid around the classroom, working in pairs, and from colouring sheets.

For the theme “les couleurs”, there were multiple toys sorted by colours as well as colouring sheets for children to learn the names of colours in French. I also liked to display their work so that they could feel proud of their work and go back to it to revise what they learned. For the theme “les numeros", they used blocks, Lego, and play dough to experience counting in French. Also, they worked really hard on creating their own number booklets where they have learned numbers un à cinq  (1-5).  For the theme, "les fruits et les légumes", they got to play in the play-kitchen, make pretend meals, and play 'at the supermaket'.

They loved this one: La Chanson: J'aime les fruits! 

Along with these themes, the students enjoyed listening, singing along and dancing to French songs. With both the theme-based learning as well as songs, the objective of the French instruction was for them to become familiar and broaden their understanding of key words/vocabulary. More than anything, I wanted the students to explore French and build a genuine interest and passion to keep learning French in the future.

Letter of the Week!

Learning Wall: Letter of the Week   - "C"

Teaching Kindergarten was a pleasant experience as I got to see many of the children's first time grasping alphabets and numbers. I felt it took a lot more time to come up with ideas to ensure my teaching was engaging and were in a series of short lessons, keeping their attention span in mind. As this age group is very dependent in terms of having to rely on verbal instructions, pictures, and observations, it was important  to avoid using worksheets for a large part. 

Book of the Week: C for Caterpillar

I planned many literacy building activities such as "Letter of the Week" whereby the students learned an alphabet a week- how to recognize it, its phonetic pronunciation, and how to write it. As well through out the week I read books and we sang songs together that had words that highlighted the week's alphabet. At the end of the week, the students' "homework" was to bring an item from home which started with the letter of the week for Show and Tell. The students absolutely loved the activities as they had much to tell their parent(s) and it also gave a way for the parents to connect with their child's learning. 

'F' for Frankenstein- Show and Tell