Katie TS #10

Today I tutored Matthew again. Matthew seemed to be in a good mood because he only had a half day of school today. We began the tutoring session by warming up with two sheets of math problems, at his moms request. While Matthew works on his math homework, as long as he doesn't have any questions, I go through the book and select vocabulary words that I can ask Matthew about. Today Matthew had a new book from last time. This book is not in the Magic Treehouse series and has a wider range of vocabulary in it. However, Matthew chose the fifth book from the series so he didn't have much motivation to read it. Before we began reading I attempted a schema building activity by discussing the different types of dragons mentioned in the book. Matthew seemed to enjoy that, but reading was a struggle today. I think once the level of the book is semi-difficult, he has a really hard time getting past the words that he does not know. For the prologue I allowed Matthew to read silently to himself. I don't think that Matthew really read the whole prologue, so for chapter 1 I had Matthew read aloud. After Matthew finished reading a couple pages I asked him simple concept questions and it was obvious that he was just reading the words and not gathering any meaning from the reading. We discussed what happened and went over key vocabulary words. Next week, if we continue with this book, I will try to motivate Matthew to enjoy the topic of the book with a better schema building activity.