Today was our second session at Hawthorne mentoring student writers. Unfortunately, our regular class was away on a field trip on Monday so we weren't able to meet with our previous partner. It would have been nice for consistency, but I was happy to work with a new student, regardless.
I worked with a grade 7 student named Andy, whose first language was Mandarin but he still spoke English fluently. My last session with a student felt unproductive because there were no errors in his writing- I felt I had no reason to assist him. To prevent that same feeling, I brought a few worksheets and activities all about the English language and the difficulties that can arise during writing, speech and pronunciation (they will be listed at the end of the blog post as well as the Resources page).
I started off with the famous English Pronunciation Poem by G. Nolst Trenité. I thought this would be a fun read-aloud activity for my student because even though it's difficult, there is fun in making mistakes and guessing the pronunciation of words by trial and error. It's an extremely well-written poem with lots of difficult and unusual words (even for a native English speaker). Unfortunately, my student gave up within the first 10 lines and said it was boring and that he wanted to do something else. I was taken aback and quickly moved on to the next thing I prepared. In hindsight however, I recognize that this student was feeling particularly overwhelmed by the material. I should have scaffolded for his learning by reading some of the poem to him first or pronouncing certain words that I could have anticipated would be challenging.
Next, I moved on to some writing prompts. I handed the page to Andy and instructed him to choose a writing prompt that inspired him and to fill the blank space below with what came to mind. We did this twice and his results are below:
Although his responses lacked depth and sometimes substance, I was pleased that he humoured me for both of these activities and chose the writing prompts that appealed to him.
The next activity we did was reading a list of English homophones (words that are pronounced the same as another word but differ in meaning and/or spelling) and explaining the use and/or definition of each one. Andy seemed to enjoy this activity thoroughly and he liked the challenge of figuring out which word was which. I also included a sentence at the bottom that required him to re-write a sentence using homophones:
The last activity we did together was taken from our workshop with Deanna Young on poetry. I gave Andy the guidelines for the Math poem and let him create a piece of writing that reflected his feelings on the subject. I actually found his poem very interesting because he is very skilled in math (he said it was his best subject) but he isn't too fond of it. You can read his poem here:
Overall, I felt like I helped this student more than I was helpful in my first week at Hawthorne. I was more prepared and I had resources ready incase the student's writing was near perfect. Next week I will try to prepare material for Midsummer Night's Dream to help Edward.
Resources I used:
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