Look at other entries in this category and recall we began July 2 or so.
My concern has been that I feel I am not circling enough. I am seduced by the way my student comprehends everything as shown by her answers to a great variety of what I call common sense or fact based (pace Trump supporters) questions. I ask if whales swim in the sea or the pool and she replies the pool unless at Sea World.
So as we get deeper and deeper into a complex web of stories like yesterday’s where the deer wants to live with the fox but the fox wants to live alone and so goes to lives in a cave where there are no leaves or grass for him/her to eat. My confusion on the sex led me astray as to gender when my granddaughter suggested the deer was ugly and that is why the fox didn’t want to live with her, so I wrote laide, the feminine, rather than laid, the masculine (with dramatic difference in pronunciation).
Ben Slavic’s TPRS in a Year is my guide and it offers a great deal to the novice. He mentions adding one detail can render more expansive circling and I realized that by adding items to a sentence like “to eat”, I was adding that detail b/c then I could circle “to eat or to drink”.
Similar questions are Do the wolves look for grass to eat or rabbits to eat, and the like.
Slavic also says to bring in parallel sentences and I realize I have been doing that with The snake is white and the deer is brown. The bear is brown and the rabbit is white.
A common sense question is Where does a white bear live?
What disquiets me is the pace of learning, it is extremely fast. But do I put the brakes on?
Just a few lessons into this course, someone else joined us, an older lady. I encouraged my granddaughter to let me know if that was OK. After a couple of joint lessons, she asked for private lessons again. My wife got out of her that we were going to slow with the other person in the class.
I regret losing that second member b/c it opens up more possibilities with two people, esp for actors, but we are doing OK as is now.
The other thing is my wife met a French lady at her exercise class who is excited about answering any of my questions about French. I will make a list as they occur to me, but in the meantime I am ordering a grammar book by Granville (?) and Word Routes from Cambridge U. is on its way.
Today I asked my two Spanish-speaking friends about a point in grammar: in French I would say ‘quelque chose a manger’ for something to eat. ‘Pour manger’ would mean in order to eat, as in We went to a drive-through in order to eat quickly’. But I got to thinking that in Spanish I would say ‘pour manger’ i.e. ‘para comer’ in both cases. I checked that out with them and they agreed it would always be ‘para comer’ and never ‘a comer’ in such a context. The key to the French, BTW, is you use ‘a’ when the infinitive has a passive sense, ‘to be eaten’, i.e. something to be eaten, as in ‘I have something to (be) eat(en).’
Aug. 8 update: I gave my granddaughter a story with open-ended lines, a kind of written ‘ask the story’. I took what she handed back, which showed comprehension and imagination/creativity, and developed what I hoped were circling type responses to her responses. All I can say is that there is circling in there but it was a bit buried under the fun of developing material with her around the story.