Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Pablo, pumpkins, and pirates

The other week I got a new student to teach for an hour on Tuesday nights. However, last week he was sick, so today was our first session.

Pablo is 6 years old, and his parents want me to just play with him, or do whatever activity I think will be helpful, but only speaking in English. They also don't want us to do any writing, just verbal. Because of this, there's a lot that he doesn't understand when I talk to him, so I mainly stuck to naming things. His bedroom is filled with toys, toys, and more toys. Lots of pirates, star wars, books, plastic animals, kitchen play-set, those sorts of things - which is great for teaching him words.

Today we started with colors. Added numbers. Progressed to "Pablo, can you find three things in your room that are yellow?" And he'd walk around and point to things. He had some Halloween balloons floating around his floor that he had drawn on with marker, so we looked at each one, and learned "bats, ghost, pumpkin, cat, skull, and witch" from his drawings.

Went through his bucket of animals - this kid has lots of elephants. 11 elephants, if my memory serves me well. Later all his pirate figurines got pulled out. Followed by two boxes of Star Wars characters. Then he wanted to play with the kitchen stuff, but at that point our time was up.

It'll be interesting to see what he remembers - if anything - next week. A week is a long time to go without any reinforcement. So, a successful first 'lesson', and now I have grocery money for the week. :)

In other news, midterms in our reunidas courses start next week Thurs/Friday, ending on the following Mon/Tuesday... so I'm trying to start studying this week. Tomorrow morning I'm meeting my second intercambio for the first time. Her name is Eva, and she's an actress/model/dancer. So, expect a summary of our first meeting in the near future.

Also - random bit - learned today during a tangent in my syntax class that the @ is sometimes used in informal Spanish writing to signify both genders, por ejemplo: chic@s = chicos/chicas. So it'll save you from having to use the backslash. It simply had never occurred to me before that the @ had that usage.

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