Day Off

Today Kaylene started teaching. After our run and our breakfast, I still got ready and went down to help her out. I went to the first hour of classes, and then for the forty minute break and the hour and a half of the second class I cleaned. I cleaned the bathroom, the kitchen, my room, and the walkway. But guess what? The kitchen is of course already messy again. Eh, it happens.

I had to eat lunch alone because I wasn't sure if I was allowed to eat lunch downstairs if I didn't teach because I didn't know if there would be enough food. So, I had some piddly top-roman stuff upstairs, cleaned some more, and then worked a little bit on my next week's lesson plans while Nancy and Kaylene took their lunch break (which they spent preparing for afternoon class). I did go to the last hour and a half of school because that's the craziest, when we teach for 45 minutes with a group of mixed ages (3, 4, and 5 year olds).

After school I tutor a preschooler before doing my group tutoring sessions. But, apparently I got my kids mixed up this week. Matthew comes Mondays and Fridays, and Kristy comes Wednesdays and Fridays. I switched them in my head so on Monday I tutored Kristy and today I tutored Matthew. On Monday it was okay because Matthew was absent, but today Teacher Michelle brought Kristy up and asked why I wasn't tutoring her. I was confused for a little while, and then I checked my schedule. Oops. Mark another screw up for Brooke. But, because both kids are getting two days in this week (like they're supposed to) it's not a big deal, I'll let it slide.

The group tutoring went by a lot better today then last night. Granted, they're different kids, but I think that I had a lot more patients with the group because I hadn't taught today. I did little stuff to liven up my lesson, and the little stuff went a long way. I have to remember that for all of my other tutoring sessions.

I started tutoring someone else today too. From 8-9pm I tutor Dar-sen who is a cute little boy (in the fifth grade kind of little) who is a genius. He lived in America twice, once for ten months and another time for 6 months. He speaks English extremely well, he apparently competed in a high level spelling bee. His mom wants us to work on his writing because he reads all the time at home, so his reading and comprehension is outstanding, but his writing is slow. It took us the whole hour of tutoring to do one writing page in his workbook. It's not because he's dumb, it's because he's a talker. The page would give him topic sentences and then he would write three supporting sentences to make a complete paragraph, and he would just start talking to me about the topic of the paragraph, or about his sister, or about his questions about life (I've always wondered why cats don't drool). It also went by slowly because he wrote one of the paragraphs in cursive, and he needed to think really hard about how to write each letter. I was proud of myself for remembering all of the letters, upper case and lower case, in cursive. I did have to look them up to double check, but I was right. (You don't have to point out that it's not that impressive. I am quite aware of the fact that cursive is a 3rd grade topic.)

So I know I'm really going to enjoy tutoring Dar-sen, but I'll have to see how much I enjoy tutoring until 9pm. Especially since I still need to get some facts pulled together for class tomorrow.