DESPERATE for inspiration/ideas!!!

↑ amother ↓

Mon, Apr 19 2010, 10:40 pm

Thanks for the ideas! Keep em coming!
In the past when I have tried controversial issues, he hasn't really taken the bait. Just not that interested. But it's worth continuing to try and I am following your leads now to see if they're hopeful. (BTW not frum kid)

Stock market is interesting idea, wonder if I can hook him into that. There's definitely potential for tying into my learning goals.

(Oh, and for the record, I'm not "wondering" why he's not interested in me after a full day of school. I sympathize with him completely and recommended that he not rejoin the program next year. But I am still stuck with trying to get some learning out of this situation. And yes, I try to break up the 75 minutes - we spend a couple of minutes getting settled at the beginning, take a 5-minute game break after each learning activity, and one of those breaks (his choice) is 10 minutes, to give time for a run around the building, snack machine, bathroom, whatever. So we usually end up with about 50 minutes of learning time, which ends up being less because of all the shenanigans, and is STILL a lot to plan for with no curriculum)

↑ amother ↓

Mon, Apr 19 2010, 10:44 pm

Never heard of Land of Liars (googling now, but never tried it so who knows)
Captain Underpants is a little too juvenile for him. He has some sense of sophistication, gets offended if I bring in anything childish.

Re. newspapers, he would read but not give an elaborate response. If he agrees to take a position at all, he would at most just go as far as saying so. Elaboration is exactly what I would love to work on with him and it is exactly what he refuses to do. But I will keep trying that anyway, at least just for the sake of showing my supervisor that I'm trying something even if the kid isn't responding...

↑ amother ↓

Mon, Apr 19 2010, 10:49 pm

Any link to controversial articles on 5th-ish grade level?

The topics mentioned above are intriguing but having a hard time finding anything easy enough available online and I REALLY don't have time to make something from scratch... need to teach tomorrow (did I mention I have a real teaching job in addition to this? My other students all put together for a whole morning are not half as difficult as one hour with this kid twice a week!) and haven't slept yet...

Mimi, do you have any specific graphic novels to recommend? So much of what I saw in the library looked soooo inappropriate... Also, ideas of specific learning activity to do with them, maybe that fosters higher level inferential thinking?

↑ marina ↓

Mon, Apr 19 2010, 10:52 pm

Kids learn the most when they are teaching. The best lesson is one in which he is the teacher and someone else is the student. For example, you can give him a standard 6th grade history book, ask him to choose any chapter and make up a worksheet for you to do about the chapter. You cannot read the book in advance. If the worksheet is good and really tests you on the material, he is done for the day after he grades your work. Your lesson is over, even if it takes him fifteen minutes.

Basically, your main problem here is motivation. What motivates the kid is having the lesson end early and spending time with the DS - use that! Use that either with the check system or just as above- outline what you want to get done and explain that the lesson is over after your goals are done, no matter how little time it takes. You do not need to use 50 minutes or 75 minutes. You need to get him to process the material and engage with the learning and that can be done in 15 minutes.

This should immediately improve speed and work quality, although he will argue a bit more about quality, so you need to make the standards clear ahead of time.

↑ Mimisinger

Mon, Apr 19 2010, 10:54 pm

Maus of course, is all about WW2, you can do a genre study. What is creating the message? How is cartooning different?

Different aspects of the pictures, lettering, even arrows and wavy lines, work.

He of course, has to use that genre knowledge to create his own cartoons. But you have to really go through different cartoons and find out what they're all about.

He also has to do his own research online, finding cartoons. They even have cartoon makers online, but they really stink.

You can do multiple genre. Have him write or even tell a story and then express it in a cartoon. it's like a poem. A small cartoon, tells a whole story.

I can continue tomorrow, but I have to go to sleep now. Sorry.

↑ amother ↓

Mon, Apr 19 2010, 11:44 pm

Thanks for the ideas, people! You've gotten me rolling enough to hopefully get through tomorrow. Let's keep this thread going, though, there's a MONTH left and with this kid's attention span nothing lasts more than one session... two, tops, if I'm REALLY lucky.

Cartoons he might be fine with but only up to the point where it gets to discussing the genre and making his own. Anything that asks him to generate more than a couple of words response (and a picture is worth more than a couple of words...) flops on impact. This is why I end up doing a lot of card game type activities... fill in the blanks... fill in the chart... etc.

morahl

Tue, Apr 20 2010, 2:26 pm

I teach 6 grade boys. I agree that it would be good if you could find the right chavruta for him to work with. As far as subjects of interest, I've had luck with history - begin with reading about an exciting event - "The Hindenburg Disaster". That happened in 1937. Then have him research the year 1937 to see what else was going in that year.

I often write articles myself. I wrote one describing the Great Depression beginning with the stock market crash of 1929. This led to a lot of questions and further study. Inventions are also a great topic.

Other good topics: "Bigfoot, real or myth?" "The Invention of the Airplane"

I do a lot of searching on the internet for interesting articles to read, and often edit them myself.

Hatzlacha!

↑ amother ↓

Thu, Apr 22 2010, 3:04 pm

OP back after another lousy tutoring session. By the way, did I mention that the success of a session can sometimes have as much to do with the kid's mood as anything I plan? Though in theory if my lesson is interesting enough it should be able to scrape by anyway...

Going through what I tried:
1. Controversial reading piece: Started with a pre-reading survey to try to get him on a side of the controversy. As expected, he gave one word answers without even thinking for a second about the questions. Then went on to reading, mumbling and grumbling the whole way. Got through 1/2 of page 1 of a 2-page article about Queen vs. Dudley, with much resistance. He was not interested at all, I left the rest for next time but I bet he will refuse to even pick it up in the first place. Continuing things from one session to another never goes over well.

2. Vocabulary game with words we'd done previously, in a sentence fill-in format. It went OK because even though the kid refused to get involved, it didn't require much involvement. One-word halfhearted answers are fine. (Disadvantage is that they're also QUICK, which means I need to plan more activities to get through the required time!)

3. Land of liars: Decided to give it a try, practice systematic, logical thinking. I ended up doing most of the systematic, logical thinking though. Which I suppose isn't so bad, you can call it modeling - he took a guess on a hunch and I, um, modeled how to prove/disprove by checking against all the clues. (modeled because he refused to get involved after a certain point!) Anyway, he frustrated pretty easily, did not pay the slightest bit of attention to my 'modeling', and I felt like the activity was another flop. Maybe a simpler version of something similar might get somewhere, though I'm not sure where to find any -- these are all pretty hard. I think he got bogged down by all the rules you have to read and process in order to decode the clues (the liars are blah blah, and the truth tellers always etc etc....) Any recommendations of simplified logic puzzles or books wherein I might find one?

4. Continuing webquest that I had painstakingly spent an entire evening and night preparing because he expressed interest in learning about a specific topic: Refused. He just refused to do it. And I had thought it was a stroke of brilliance the way I set it up, and thought it was safe because he'd asked for it.

5. Computer game to practice a skill we'd worked on in the past: Refused.

6. Continued reading book that we'd been chipping away at, a little each session: read but refused to discuss.

Yes, we took ample DS and nosh breaks between each activity, and I did not realistically expect to cram 6 activities into a session; I just prepared them all because I knew from experience that some would get refused.

Feel the frustration... 7 of these left... just 2 weeks until I have to write my paper about all the wonderful progress we made this year, with evidence from student work... shock

↑ amother ↓

Wed, Apr 28 2010, 6:27 pm

Yeah I'm not sooo worried about the report, I think I can write something that sounds good anyway...

But I am SO SO SO frustrated about having to do another 6 lessons. It just keeps getting worse because every time there are fewer things left in this universe that I haven't tried. Plus, high stakes testing is just about finished now and he feels he is doing well, which would be a good thing except that it makes him even less motivated than ever!

Last session was a total waste of time. There were no professors there (they only supervise once a week) so when he balked at all my activities I just kind of gave up. I let him fool around more than I usually would have and helped him with some homework more than usual too. (Part of the problem was just bad luck -- what I had planned to take up half of my lesson time happened to be something his school teacher had done with him a couple of days before and he showed me the evidence from school that he had mastered it! AARGH! I turn my back for 3 days and he gets ahead of me! And I was just too tired and crabby to think of an alternate plan on the spot, especially since my computer went berserk, otherwise I would have found a different activity online or something). But tomorrow is a supervised day and I am 100% OUT OF IDEAS.

HELLLLP!

↑ amother

Fri, Apr 30 2010, 5:24 pm

Because I have professors breathing down my neck looking for productivity, and we already have more downtime than any other pair in the room. Plus, other pairs' downtime consists of activities that can be construed as productive (e.g. playing a board game together - developing strategy, sportsmanship, communication, etc) while mine is embarrassing - I sit there with a timer while my kid has his nose in a video game. Zero interaction. So I allow what I absolutely need but I can't encourage or increase it.

Besides, as I explained already, the promise of DS time or other external reinforcers does not motivate this student to apply himself to the learning activities. The learning itself needs to be motivating or he will barely do it. (I.e. will do the bare minimum needed to say "here, I did it" but not enough to really learn from it)