Time and Sequence

It felt good to go back to my intermediate class today, but it also felt nice to know more faces in the building. I am building quite the reputation at school! I think a few people think I am a student because I am so young, I had someone compliment me on how well my English was. To which my thought was I hope it's good it's my native language. At 22, I am definitely the youngest tutor at school, but I kind of like it that way. Most of the students are around my age, so it really allows me to identify with them. I still can't believe the adversity present right here in central Pennsylvania but hey, I love it. Just more relatives I can drop a line when I'm traveling the world for the rest of my life ;]

Since there are only two more weeks of class left the GED test will take place after those two weeks. Last week we worked on an intensive lesson on reading comprehension, so today we worked on improving our writing skills (the GED test will be mostly reading and writing tasks).

I passed back some previous writings that they had completed and we dissected these compositions in tenses. I explained the importance of sequence in writing so that readers can comprehend time that has lapsed in your story. Key words like first, now, and last transition ideas and establish paragraph development. We read examples of essays with and without transitions to exacerbate the concept. Then, they had a good portion of class time to add transitions to improve their writing, remove transitions that were used incorrectly, or rearrange sequences in their story to make more complete sense.

This crossed over into a mini lesson about test taking, and how to spot words like this when skimming a composition and answering comprehensive questions about it, score! I personally find it funny whenever I give advice about test taking because it has never been my strong suit. But they are very thankful for the tips. I have one student that has taken the math portion of the GED four times and failed. He is not giving up, everything counts.

After the break we worked on a fun activity using a timeline. The students had to figure out a puzzle using contextual clues about time and place events in chronological order. I think they found it very reinforcing. Afterwards each student read their edited essay to a peer. The test was that if another student could successfully delineate the order of the story without further explanation, than there were a sufficient amount of transitions present. Whenever a peer was confused in the story, the writer knew exactly where they needed a transition. By being both the reader, writer, and listener, they could start to spot needed transitions before they were told there was anything missing.

I take lessons like these extremely seriously, especially because of the teaching standards required by the government. These students are not just trying to have everyday conversation in America, they need to pass national exams. It is up to me to get them there. Good things certainly come in due time.