Venus TS #5

Date/Time: Sunday, May 18th, 10pm 

Location: Kellogg Building

Topic/Skill: Verb Tense Application – Speaking & Writing Practice; Simple (Part 2)

Feedback provided to the tutee:
In our second session, Juliana applied her understanding of verb tenses through structured speaking and writing activities. We did a fun “Time Travel Interview” where she described her past weekend, current daily routine, and future plans. This allowed her to practice switching tenses naturally in conversation. We ended the session with a “tense ladder” writing exercise, where she wrote one sentence in each tense. Juliana showed notable improvement in sentence formation and began self-correcting when she noticed a mismatch between subject and verb tense.

Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned:
Creating a safe space for Juliana to experiment and reflect helped her take more ownership of her learning. Using simple, relatable prompts and combining visual, verbal, and written practice proved effective. I learned that blending creativity with clear structure empowers students who are intimidated by grammar—especially when they see how far they’ve come between sessions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

McKenna TS #11

Date: 6/26/25 Location: Online  Topic: Debating (AI) Feedback Provided: I mostly gave my tutee feedback about sound pronunciation, especially for “v” and “w” and “th” and “sh” sounds. I taught her about minimal pairs because she tends to mix those pairs up with each other. We also  Lessons Learned: In this lesson I learned a lot about the difficulties of teaching over a computer. I think one of my strengths that I’ve noticed in these lessons is my ability to teach pronunciation, but I didn’t realize how much easier it is when you are face to face with a student and they can see the way your mouth moves. This lesson taught me to get better at explaining how to position one’s mouth and tongue for certain sounds. It also taught me that it’s more helpful to say the word slowly to myself first in order to understand the mouth positioning, rather than just repeating it slowly over and over again. 
Read more

McKenna TS #13

 Date: 7/3 Location: Online Topic: Job Interviews/Professionalism Feedback Provided: I gave my tutee feedback on how to structure her answers to typical interview questions. For example, when asked about what her greatest weakness is, I told her to give an honest answer but to make sure it’s something that she can then explain how she’s working on it or how it makes her a better worker. We also talked about how it’s okay to keep some answers more short and sweet (such as the one about weaknesses), while going more in depth about others (such as the ones asking about why you’re the most qualified candidate). Lessons Learned: In this activity, I provided a lot more linguistic support. I gave her answer structures and example answers prior to her answering the questions, which I think helped guide me in giving better feedback and also helped her understand her answers and the questions a lot better. I also learned how important it is to pay attention to my own speech in these lessons....
Read more

McKenna TS #14

Date: 7/7 Location: Online  Topic: Reading Comprehension and “th” Sound Pronunciation Feedback Provided: I had my tutee read a story that used a lot of “th” sounds in it and gave her feedback whenever she messed those up. She often would say it as a “sh” sound instead, so we went over the differences in mouth movements in each of those sounds. Lessons Learned: In my previous lessons with other tutees, I learned that it’s hard to produce pronunciation mistakes when a student is reading directly from a page. I tried to prevent that this time by having her read it out loud a few times and then reciting it to me as best as she could. While this did work better, I did learn that it’s probably best to have them memorize something before hand and then say it to me, as she missed many of the key words that I was looking for. I did, however, learn that this is a great way to test comprehension. I was able to see things she missed and placed where she got characters/topics confused with anot...
Read more