Feb. 8 (Wed.)

Block one clued me in to the trouble that Block two would probably have with the legend art analysis, so I was able to get through the intro much better with this group. We wrote each sentence together, talking about what we needed to include and phrasing each sentence as a whole class. They ‘discovered’ much more about the St. George picture than I expected, even picking up on the cave and the Una’s people in the castle without my prompting.

The novice ESL kids made comparison charts for the two dragons, which brought out Sumaya’s hidden vocab talents. She was trying to figure out the English for the word destroy. She drew a little picture and kept hitting it with her pencil and making crashing sounds. Finally she said that the word sounded like story and we figured out that she was looking for the word DEstroy. She is really making so much more progress than Gabby and Joseph, and it is all because she obviously cares and wants to learn. She and Minah are becoming friends, which I am glad to see since Gabby is such a terrible influence on Minah. I’m sure that Minah is strong enough to not follow Gabby’s lead, but I’m glad that she has a friend who values school the same way she does.

We were able to get Joseph to give his speech last week, but this week we haven’t been able to get much out of him. With Jaime being suspended, we are hoping that things go better for him and the girls. Gabby, Claudia, and Johanna boo hooed all afternoon yesterday because they thought he had been expelled or moved to another team. He will be back on Monday, but on an abbreviated schedule, he’ll go home after my class. I think he lives in the same trailer park as Claudia and Johanna, so I can’t get them away from him totally.