Goal
Beter connect MR to plants and bioremediation and have her pull excerpts from articles that she can use in her introduction.
Opening
I started tutoring session #2 by asking MR how working with her brother went. She told me that while at first it was difficult because his english is much less developed than hers, it actually served as a good lesson for her because she had to learn how to explain the information in different ways. MR also told me that her brother is very interested in plants now and when the weather gets nicer they are going to try to start a small garden in their backyard.
I then asked MR if she had gone over her flashcards each night since we last met. She smiled at me at told me to test her. Picking flashcards at random, I showed MR the side that contained the word and picture and asked her to produce the definition. She correctly did this for 18 out of the 20 flashcards (90% of the time), and was also able to produce the sentence she used the word in the majority of the time.
Once we completed this, I then outlined what we were going to be doing during the tutoring session today and shared the goal with MR.
Connecting Interests and Plant Life
I wanted MR to see how beautiful the plants were in her home, the Dominican Republic, as well as in South Korea, the home of her favorite music groups. By doing this I was hoping MR would develop a closer personal connection to the introduction topic and have more ownership over her work. The first site we looked at strictly had photos of plants that are found in the Dominican Republic. When we first began to look at these plants, MR’s face lit up! She told me stories about how some of those plants grew in her own backyard while others grew by the road side and she would see them on the way to school. The second site we looked at also dealt with Dominican plants, but this one contained much more in depth information about when and how long they grow. We read through this together, and I had MR circle any words she was unfamiliar with; we made flashcards for these words and added them to her growing collection.
Lastly, we looked at various plants that are indeginous to South Korea and compared them with the Dominican plants we had just looked at as well as plants that are found here, in Rhode Island. Overall I found this exercise to be very fruitful because it better connected MR to the topic and made her want to learn more about how plants “work.” It served as a very good segue into our next activity.
Reading Articles about Bioremediation
We transitioned from looking at and reading about plants to examining articles that explain how we can use plants to help clean up our environment. I printed two articles out for MR: the first generally outlined what bioremediation is and why it is important while the second delved deeper into the role plants have in this process. My first step with MR was having her read article one outloud. There were some words MR had significant trouble pronouncing and so we spent time going over them and repeating them back and forth. Once MR did this, I had her fill out a K/W/L chart to help her target what she was familiar with about the topic and what she wanted to learn about the topic. This was designed to help MR build confidence and realize that she has background information that she can now build upon. I then had MR silently read through the article again circling any words she did not know. We made flashcards for these words and added them to her collection. I then had MR read through the article a third time, underling what she considered to be important text and writing a summary for every two paragraphs she read. These exact steps were followed for article two as well.
Homework
MR’s homework was first to go home and show her brother the pictures of the Dominican and Korean plants we looked and to explain a bit about them. I suggested that they pick several of these plants that they are most interested in and plant them in the garden they had talked about creating in their backyard. The second part of MR’s homework assignment was to re-read her article summaries and highlight portions of the text she underlined to include in her introduction. I asked her to write a journal reflection about this so that she could identify what made this highlighted text important enough to include in her lab report. I told MR that if she did not know the word in english she wanted to write she should feel comfortable writing it in Spanish.