After quite a bit of emailing, leaving phone messages, and with the help of Prof. Kim, I was able to set up a time with my child tutee for the first session. I learned from my assigned child's mother that her son is actually her daughter, Nayun, and she is in kindergarten at Gilchrest Elementary School. Nayun's mother chose Books A-Million for our first tutoring session.
I went to the first session more than 20 minutes early, because I knew we would need some time to identify each other. I had told Nayun's mother what I would be wearing. When I arrived in the children's section of the store, I saw Nayun and her mother immediately. Apparently they had arrived even earlier than I had.
After introducing ourselves to each other, we all sat down at one of the little tables in the children's section of the store. Nayun spoke Korean to her mother and she spoke English to me. I did not notice any accent or mispronunciations in her speaking voice – which was completely consistent with what Prof. Kim told us about the flexibility of a child's learning potential at this age that comes to languages. I had brought with me several items, including a few books, flashcards, story cubes, etc., that I had picked up pretty cheaply. I asked my tutee if she would be willing to do some things for me. She said that she would. I started with a kindergarten-aged maze book. She completed an easy maze correctly. She completed an intermediate maze quickly. So, I gave her one of the hard mazes to complete at the back of the book, and she completed that correctly also. It was clear that she had mastered mazes. At about this point, her mother decided to go look at some books on her own and leave us alone to finish. After that, Nayun just looked at me and stopped talking. It was clear that she was uncomfortable with sitting alone with a new adult. So I suggested that we go look for her mother and she jumped up immediately. After locating her mother in another section store of the store, I asked her mom to sit with us until we finished our initial assessment, explaining that Nayun had stopped speaking. Her mother then rejoined us.
Nayun's mother told me that her daughter has five a Dr. Seuss books at home and she reads them on her. My tutee looked at me and grinned ear-to-ear what her mother told me this. I congratulated Nayun on being so smart. We then reviewed flashcards with colors, numbers, letters, and words, such as zebra, lion, cat, and nest. She got all of these correct.
I next tried to get Nayun interested in the story cubes. She seemed to be confused by them and said she had never seen anything like these before. She did recognize the dinosaurs on the cubes, which I thought was impressive sense there were several different kinds that did not look anything alike. After encouraging her to try to make up a story about the cubes with me, we moved on to something else because it was clear she was either not understanding or had no interest in this. I suspect she felt uneasy encountering this is something new, in addition to having already encountered me as something new.
Next I took out a book called Ferdinand of the Bull. I asked my tutee if she had read this book. She said that she had not. We went through the book together and I asked her questions about what was going on. She seemed interested and answered the questions I asked. She was unable, however, to read most of the words in the book. This particular book, although written on about the first grade level, was unlike her Dr. Seuss books, and it was written in prose with no rhyme.
We were running out of time at this point, and it was clear that Nayun's attention was waning. She was a bit jumpy get her chair, but stayed in it. Her mother and I discussed future sessions and decided that the next session would be at the Leon County Public Library, Northeast Branch. We will email each other about details prior to the session. We discussed briefly having at least some of the sessions outside of the classroom typesetting to encourage Nayun to talk more and to challenge her imagination. Nayun's mother is open to this. However, we will not be meeting next week because it is Spring Break and Nayun's father, who is a grad student, will be spending family time with Nayun and her mother.
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