Alexandra enjoys using the lab
“Here are some of Tim French’s accomplishments over the past eight to nine months. He’s doing very well,” says tutor Gail Abrams.
- Learned to alphabetize words quite well. Recently he put studious and study in the correct order in NO TIME AT ALL. In other words, he’s not have any trouble going out to even the fifth letter to determine the alphabetical order of words.
- Tim’s foundation in alphabetizing has really increased his ease of dictionary use. You should see him flipping through the pages to find the word he’s looking for! He checks the words at the top of the page, and knows right away if he has to go forward or back, or if the word is on the page he has.
- Tim has learned the concept of syllables, as essentially the number of vowel sounds in a word. Most of the time he is able to accurately determine the number of syllables in a word.
- Tim has become aware of word endings, for noun/verb agreement and for verb tense. In particular, he has become aware of ‘ed’ as the past tense ending. He’s also learning that sometimes ‘ed’ adds a syllable to a word, e.g., want (1) and wanted (2), but sometime it doesn’t, e.g., talk (1) and talked (1). It’s really great that he can hear the soft ‘t’ sound that “ed” makes at the end of many words.
- Tim has learned several punctuation marks: The period, the question mark, and the exclamation point for ending sentences; quotation marks for conversation; the apostrophe for possession and the comma to separate words in lists and to separate phrases.
- Perhaps the biggest accomplishment of all is that he’s gained enough confidence in himself, and his study habits that he is starting a City College associates degree program. Today, January 14, is the first day of his new course of study!
William Barrett has significant accomplishments to share. He attends classes at the John Adams Campus of City College of San Francisco and is very near to earning his High School Equivalency Diploma. William is particularly proud that he and his wife recently bought their own home and he was able to read the mountain of complicated paperwork necessary to do so. William says, “You got to be careful with those forms. I read every word before we signed anything.”
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