TS#4 - Sultan

I met with Sultan at Starbucks over the weekend. I had him do some intensive reading by reading a poem called “So, we’ll go no more a roving”. It was a rather short poem with only twelve lines. I made sure to choose a simple rhyming poem that could be reread quickly several times so that he could analyze and discuss the poem by referencing lines whenever he needed. While we did have a lot of fun talking about the poem and the symbolism in it, I do think that I might have mistakenly picked a poem that was i+2 rather than i+1. He understood most of the words, and only asked me what nine out of the seventy-seven words meant. Overall, he had an 88% vocabulary comprehension of the poem, but the symbolism and the dual meanings of words in the poems proved to be somewhat more difficult for him to interpret. He was able to answer questions about the poem fairly well, and seemed to enjoy the activity. He then asked me about different ways of greeting someone and we made a dialogue that he had to write, read and reenact. I think that next time I will work in more grammar by using a bottom-up strategy like the ones used last class, and by using poems with more high frequency words.