Abby and I met at Black Dog Café for tutoring today. It went really well and we decided to meet there from now on. We met on a Tuesday this time because I will be out of town this weekend.
To start the session, I played her a recording of Shel Silverstein reading his poem True Story. I gave her a copy of the text with some of the words blanked out. She listened to it twice and filled in (she only missed two of the words!) We then went over the poem, discussing its context, some of the words she was not familiar with (den, swamp, swooped, and quicksand).
After this, I brought in a handout on countable and uncountable nouns. Using know when to use “a” is a big problem for Abby. I taught her that you can use “a” with countable nouns, but not uncountable nouns. For example, dollar vs. money, song vs. music, job vs. work, tip vs. advice, view vs. scenery.
To close up our session, we went over a list of idiomatic expressions I brought in. Abby had actually heard of a few of them but didn’t know what they mean! I made her use each in a sentence and we named a few situations for each in which she could use the phrase. They included:
Make yourself at home.
Do you own thing.
Make the best of something.
Do one’s best.
I really liked this lesson idea with using poetry! It was interesting and fun :)
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