I am so happy right now! I feel like I’ve made two new friends! I spent a lot of time today talking with Xanthe, so now I feel more like we’re friends than acquaintances, which is really nice. It’s so much fun when you’ve talked to someone and discovered things about them that make you like them more.
Also, I just came from tutoring at Lafayette School in Oakland, where I’ve been working with a fifth-grader named Classi. I always felt frustrated when tutoring her because she’s really smart and doesn’t seem to really have big problems with anything, so I felt like I wasn’t really helping her that much and figured she was probably bored with what we were doing. This week I decided I had to change that, so I brainstormed for a bit and decided some creative writing might suit her. She told me during our first session that she had started ‘writing a book’ on her computer at home, and I know she has a good grasp of language and is imaginative, so I thought this might work. It succeeded fantastically! I could tell she was having fun and really liked what we were doing, and we ended up writing a three-page ‘book’ complete with cover and illustrations. (It’s called The Girl and the Talking Frog — though there are no princesses involved, and no magic except for the fact that the frog talks.) The copy machine was broken so I gave it to her to bring home, asking her to bring it back next week so I can take it and make a copy. 🙂 And she learned a lot too. We worked on verb tenses (keeping them uniform through the story) and things like paragraph breaks and how to use quotation marks. She picks things up really fast, which is nice, so now she has a lot more tools to use when writing her own books. 🙂
AND… I have cookies 😀 And chocolate 🙂
[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 