Today’s student was an orange level gentleman.
I had planned to do a routine and then finish with a review of an item.
That was my plan but one of the challenges of being a coach is the unknown and also having to be adaptable and be prepared for each student’s individual needs.
Recently I have been going over routines one through three with all of my students, from pink to yellow and it has been amazing to see some of the results. I had a group of green and red students the other day and I was surprised at how useful a review it was for them and how many of these basic English principles, left unchecked, had grown dusty with disuse.
The same thing occurred today. The student had covered routine one with me previously, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear him trot off the whole of routine one with relatively few mistakes. So we moved on to The Morning Part 2!! Here we ran into quite a lot of complicated sentences, containing phrasal verbs, prepositions and new vocabulary. It was the same for Part 3, which I wrote up on the board. The student looked rather tired by this stage, but we moved on to the next part, which was to erase certain parts and get him to retell the routine. Once again he was able to reproduce the 2 parts with only a few minor slip-ups.
Over the last few weeks, while I have been reviewing these routines with my students I have realized how valuable it is to revisit the basics of the curriculum, even with the most confident students. There is always some small forgotten grammar point, missed phrasal verb, slipped preposition or dropped ‘s’ that can be found and the look of satisfaction on the student’s face after having reproduced it is worth it all.
-Gideon
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