Great Strides

This summer I will be serving as a volunteer tutor at an adult learning center in Harrisburg, PA. I am teaching English as a second language, or ESL for short. The types of students are mostly adult learners trying to pass numerous standardized tests in order to receive a higher paying job. Although I have only been tutoring for one day, I already love it! I get to practice my French, and I've made a handful of friends. I look forward to what the rest of the summer will bring. I will be using this blog to journal my experiences from each day.

I am tutoring an intermediate English speaking class. There are native Spanish, French and Chinese speakers in the class today. At the beginning of class students sign in and take a seat. Today's newspaper is waiting for them to read until instruction begins. Everyone has a name tag assigned to them, and I introduced myself to any new faces I saw. I got them any materials they needed for the day, like pencils or paper, as well as made copies of the worksheets we needed for today.

Except this morning the copier is jammed. There are only 6 students today, so everyone is expected to have their own worksheet. (There are limited materials when classes are full) While another volunteer is fixing the copier, we talk amongst ourselves about what we did over the holiday weekend. Once the copier is fixed, about 30 minutes into class time, we finally start on the lesson for today.

During the last class the students began a unit on essay writing, and today we continued with the organization of writing. First we completed an exercise where students alternated reading paragraphs of a text and then identified which was the topic sentence. They learned how to establish a main idea in a paragraph, and how to draw a topic sentence of their own from that idea. Then we worked on an exercise that left the topic sentence of a paragraph blank, and the students were advised to supply their own after reading the rest of the paragraph. This being a bit more difficult, I shared some of my own examples of topic sentences that were incorrect. This gave the students the chance to correct them, and it reiterated what is and what is not a main idea.

After several more exercises and explanations about paragraph development, the students were given a short essay assignment. They had to write a few paragraphs, using the organizational skills we had just discussed, explaining what they did over the Memorial Day weekend. They worked individually, and at this time I did some one on one tutoring with a particular French speaking student who was having difficulty understanding. I left them have plenty of time to finish the assignment, while walking around and answering questions. Before the end of class we shared some of the activities that we did over the weekend, and the specific topic sentences that they came up with were written on the board. Then, as a class, we edited the sentences if their were any grammatical errors. I drew a diagram at the end of class showing the relationship between the main idea, specific details, and conclusion that the students could reference when they continued their writing assignment next class.

Four hours of class went by so fast today! There will be no class tomorrow because the school faculty must attend a conference in State College during the day, and there are not enough volunteers to hold class. We had a small group of students today, which is probably because of the weekend, so I hope to see more in class on Thursday.