The More the Merrier

Quite unexpectedly, I've added another student to my tutoring schedule. He's private - not through Kaplan - and his mom and I found each other through an outside aid agency. We'll call him Sebastian, and he's five years old. He'll begin first grade in the fall. His kindergarten teacher suggested that he get some help in reading over the summer, but his mom kind of has her hands tied because all she could afford was $30/hour. This is far below what just about any tutor worth his/her salt would accept, but it's more than I get from Kaplan (sigh), it's tax free, and he lives fairly close to one of my other kids so it's easy for me to swing by his apartment before I head home. It's too hot to run in the afternoon anyway, and there are only so many South Park reruns I can watch, so I decided to take him on.

Sebastian's mom is from Trinidad. His 17-year-old brother clearly spent a lot of time there too, as he has a thick accent. I'm not sure where Sebastian was born, but he doesn't speak with an accent so he's spent at least a few years here. He's huge for a five-year-old, but he acts his age. Sometimes I think adults expect more from bigger kids without taking their age into account, even when it's not appropriate. So I try to treat him like a young kid even though he could probably take me down in a wrestling match in five seconds. His mother is a riot; she has a great sense of humor and is very sweet. Instead of just giving me her address, she insisted on meeting me at the subway station to walk me to her house (after she had approved of my proposed train route in the first place). She buzzed around, asking again and again if I wanted anything before the session, and gave me half a liter of cold water to take with me on the way out since it's hot. She and I had a long talk after the assessment session today about what she can do to help him, and she is clearly a woman on a mission now.

As far as Sebastian's skills go, I'm not hugely worried about him, although I'd like to see him have mastery of a few more things before first grade. He can't write much of the alphabet, but he can identify every letter (mixing up b and d, which is typical) and can tell what sounds they make. He can identify a decent number of sight words, although that could be better, too. His biggest area of weakness is decoding, and I think it's because the poor kid's never really been shown how to do it. During the last three minutes of the lesson, I had him tap under each letter in the word "bug" while saying their sounds, then say the whole thing together and he did it perfectly. Without the tapping, he'd stare at me blankly, then blurt out some random word like "slide" or "toy." Gotta love the enthusiasm, at least...

I'm looking forward to working with this family. Because it's not through Kaplan, I have the freedom to design my own curriculum. This is both a good and a bad thing, as it's obviously easier to just go through the prescribed Kaplan stuff. But I don't always agree with what they want me to do, and I'm not technically supposed to deviate from it. My only regret is that I'm going to have to stop working with him when school starts. He lives in Brooklyn and there's no way I'm going to be able to make it out there twice a week. I guess I'll just have to try to help him develop a solid, pre-first grade base with the little time we have together.