Pictures

I was disappointed that Yosuke and I didn't get to read any more in Esio Trot today. He had a lot of homework, so we spent the whole two hours just doing that.

One thing about Esio Trot that I both love and hate is the illustrations. The short story has illustrations on each page that clearly show what is happening. That's great for ESL students; seeing what they just read in picture form reinforces the meaning. But I also worry that, well, maybe they are too many pictures. You can practically tell the story from just looking at the illustrations, so I worry that Yosuke might not be learning as much as he could. Hopefully he's not relying on just the pictures.

In any case, it's fun to read something as quirky as Esio Trot. Tomorrow I'll stop by the public library again and see what else I can come up with.

I'm Back

I apologize for the lack of updates. I'm trying to decide on a good posting schedule: either every other day or Monday/Wednesday/Friday. I'm leaning toward the latter; we'll see how it goes.

Yesterday was a great week for tutoring. I had a great session with Yosuke, and Miki made some progress (I was so thrilled!). Yosuke and I had finished his school assignments and still had an hour left to go. I had been at the public library earlier that day looking at children's books, so I had a plan for our free time. (Usually we work on his grammar workbook or a practice test or something, but I think he's at the point where he can have some fun while he learns.) I let him choose between Roald Dahl's Matilda, a novel, or Esio Trot, a short story. He chose Esio Trot and we got through half of it.

It turned out to be a great story to use for learning English. There are lots of pictures and the sentence structures are fairly easy. And it's interesting, or at least more so than stories written for ESL students. I can't wait to finish it when we have free time again. After that, I might have him read something longer and more involved.