Erin - TP 5

Last Thursday, I met with Maria again; she was somewhat frustrated because of her day at work. Maria works at a house-cleaning business, and yesterday, she showed up at a house where she had a very difficult time because the owner of the house was giving her directions in English (and apparently with a very strong accent), and Maria simply could not understand. Because of these troubles that she is having with work, I decided to give an impromptu lesson on vocabulary that she would need in order to communicate effectively with clients and understand instructions.
I taught her particular commands, such as, "Clean this room," as well as words which may accompany them, such as "please". What seemed extremely necessary was to learn particular nouns around the house, seeing as the homeowner was attempting to indicate to Maria where something was located in the house, and this is where the problem started. Therefore, we practiced nouns for a while, covering everything from objects in the kitchen, to pets, to clothing. I suggested that she make English labels for everything she can think of and place them all around her house, which is what I did when I was first starting to learn Spanish. I also suggested that she keep a list of questions that she would like answered and words that she would like to know so that I know what is useful to her everyday life.
Before I left, she took out the notebook she had used when she tried to take English classes before, and seemed very interested in practicing possessive pronouns. So, I used the people and objects we had around us to demonstrate; it was not too difficult because she seemed to remember what she had been tuaght before. She also had the Spanish translations of the sentences written next to them, and these were correct.
At our next lesson, I will check to see if she labeled objects in her house, as well as go over her list of words with her. We will continue with basic vocabulary and basic sentences.