A Small (Big) Win -- & A Request for Yours!

By: Aimee Kling

Hi guys!

It's been quiet here, but the blog will (I hope) become more regularly active as I settle into some new roles and routines.

For today, I just wanted to share a "small" win from my most recent class. (And of course, I think most of us would agree that those "small" momentary wins can often be the biggest wins of all.)

My student is an incredibly hard worker. She listens to a YouTube video throughout the day that has a Russian speaker reciting English words, so that she can absorb the pronunciation. She reads children's books, practices her handwriting, and copies common vocabulary over and over in her notebooks. When she comes to class, she's prepared and always eager for feedback and correction.

Yet in spite of all this, she carries the self-defeating view that because progress can come slowly, she is a bad student. (Side note: I'd love to hear how you guys handle self-esteem and emotional conversations with your adult students. It's so challenging not to simply tell her "That's not true!" or "Don't feel that way!" But telling someone not to feel how they feel isn't effective, so I'm always trying new strategies to communicate in more respectful and effective ways.)

In addition, while she's getting the hang of the meaning and pronunciation of a lot of vocabulary words (woohoo! -- an unbelievable amount of growth for someone who didn't know the alphabet 4 months ago), she struggles with putting together complete sentences. Because she's a native Russian speaker, articles like "the" and "a" are challenging are for to remember, because they don't exist in her language. It's also easy to forget "helper" verbs -- to say "My name Aimee," for example, instead of "My name is Aimee."

So cut to the beginning of class the other day, when my student lamented that she couldn't put together complete sentences. We're finishing the unit on school vocabulary, so I had her work on an activity where she labeled school supplies as in, on, or under classroom furniture (or other school supplies, on our trickier examples).

When she worked through the combinations and felt confident about in, on, and under, I wrote out the first sentence: "The book is on the desk." Then, I underlined the words "book," "on," and "desk," and told her that we would only be changing those 3 words in our next examples. I showed her another example: "The notebook is under the table."

Then, I had her take the marker and start copying the sentence structure and filling in the words she felt confident about -- the school vocabulary and the prepositions -- within the pre-structured sentence.

She'd written about 5 of the sentences down when she looked down, gasped, and said, "Sentences!"

I watched her face go from "focused on transferring information" to "elated about writing complete sentences." She paused and read through the sentences out loud, over and over, and then continued to write through the list of sentences.

It was a great moment, and I can't wait to find new ways to show her that she can put together complete sentences and that she is an incredible student.

Comment below or send me a message if you have student or classroom wins you'd like to share!