On 9/27/2020, six members of the Syosset AYLUS (Alan Huang, Jasmine Chen, Leo Cheng, John Trach, Ryan Leung and Emily Lin) taught a ninety-minute English class to multiple newly immigrated high school students with varying degrees of proficiency in English.
The lesson consisted of three parts: reading, writing, and speaking.
Leo Cheng and Emily Lin taught the reading portion. To maintain a light mood during class, we continued giving jokes and analyzing them at the beginning of class. We then proceeded to go over the homework given to the students last week. After making sure they understood the previous week’s homework, instead of starting a SAT passage, we gave them a short story called Harrison Bergeron. At the beginning of the passage, Leo gave the students a short contextualization of the short story. After that, the students were to read and summarize each paragraph with our assistance. For the hard vocabulary or hard to pronounce words, the students highlighted and commented on their document. Their homework was to give their opinion of how the handicapper general ruled the society.
Jasmine Chen and John Thach taught the writing portion. In this class, the tutors taught students about independent and dependent clauses. Students were taught definitions and then asked to create their own sentences with the rules they learned. Later, students were led through a vocabulary sheet based around the topic of “Instruments” and practiced pronouncing challenging words. After the lesson, the tutors and students played a game of “would you rather” to create a closer connection between the students and tutors.
Ryan Leung and Alan Huang taught in class about the importance of stressing certain words in a sentence to help better understand the speaker’s intentions and meaning. For example, in a sentence, if the speaker is angry they can stress every word in a sentence in order to let the listener know they are angry or frustrated. We also taught the students about function words and content words. Content words are what make the sentence relevant and able to answer a question. Function words are the words that help make a sentence grammatically correct or make a sentence more fluid(I. e. A, for, because, etc.)
The following 6 students volunteered in today’s tutoring program: Alan Huang (1.5 hours), Jasmine Chen (1.5 hours), John Trach (1.5 hours), Leo Cheng (1.5 hours), Emily Lin(1.5 hours) and Ryan Leung (1.5 hours).
