French club: steady progression

Or should I say: steady degradation? Last Wednesday, the second meeting of our club took place, and we discovered that we were down to just one participant, which was, in a way, beneficial for that person as they received greater attention from us, the mentors. Unfortunately, we were unable to find proper venue for the activity, which caused us to move to the small library where it was difficult to conduct the tutoring as we had to keep our voices down and the desks were occupied by other pupils; we also wasted a lot of valuable time whilst tried to find an appropriate free space. Regardless of that, we had actually thought of a lesson plan, and that enabled us to use the short time we had much more fruitfully than during the last session; we decided to help the student with the imperfect tense, and we began by testing their knowledge of it, and then proceeded onto some practices exercises which we invented on the spot. Overall, I think that our participant has left with greater knowledge of that subject and seemed eager to return next week for further aid.

Our student completing an exercise 

For next week, we certainly have to find an available site which we could occupy for the club, as the fact that we had to remain huddled in the library as these conditions made it troublesome for us to carry out the activity, and it was uncomfortable for our pupil to work there. In order to improve the quality of our mentoring, we figured that we should prepare more thoroughly for each session by providing the student(s) with worksheets which would contain both explanations and exercises, so that our student(s) could keep them permanently and refer to them in the future during exam preparation, for example. We also decided to extend the parameters of our club by inviting students from younger years (7-9), as we wish to advise as many people as possible in order to help them improve their level of French, which would in turn increase the amount of participants in the club and potentially make it a more appealing and fun experience. 

Me guiding our student