A Typical Day

Our main goal at Kelly’s Kids Tutoring is to help students build their confidence and find a love of learning. It is important for students to feel good about working hard to improve their skills. In order to do this, we make sure that each child receives positive words of encouragement many times throughout their lesson. Additionally, we emphasize their success through the use of nice notes, small treats, rewards, and prizes.

Outlining a typical day of tutoring is rather difficult because all of our students are given individualized lesson plans which allow them to move at their own pace. However, children respond well to routines and clear expectations. So while we are always flexible with our plans, we like to have a standard routine for children to feel comfortable. To begin, every child receives a binder or folder to keep their lessons in and to help them throughout the summer and school year.  After our first session (which is spent discussing goals, needs, and completing some baseline assessments), a typical session may look like this:

Math:
Mastering math facts is critical in order for students to be successful in math. The Common Core Standards have increased the expectations for math fact fluency and all students benefit from reviewing them. Sessions begin with candy math, which is used as a way to practice and improve grade level fact fluency. After fact practice, we work through a daily review. This allows students to practice all of their math skills, especially the ones we have been working on in past sessions.

After working through a review, students are taught a specific skill based on their needs and the Common Core Standards. In order for students to feel motivated and engaged in learning, we always end our sessions with one of our 100+ games that review the skill taught that day or important problem solving skills.

Reading:
When students set a goal to work on their reading, we want to make sure they are motivated and can find a love for reading. Students help choose a book or novel to read during their sessions and younger students help choose what topics they would like to read about. We work on fluency and comprehension, and we focus in on specific reading skills and strategies. We spend time reading a book together and discussing important story elements and applying those comprehension mini-lessons that we have worked through.

Individual sessions may include lessons on nonfiction and fiction stories, responding to reading and analyzing the author’s purpose, working on supporting our answers with text support, or even practicing skills to work on decoding and oral fluency. Younger students often have an additional emphasis on phonics, decoding, and phonemic awareness skills.  Many times we end our sessions with a game or activity to review the comprehension skill emphasized that day.

Writing:
Unfortunately, writing tends to be a subject that children either love or dread. We hope to break down the writing process so that students feel less overwhelmed and more encouraged to do their best. Together, we will brainstorm ideas and spend our time writing within the three main genres including informational, opinion, and narrative. Tying grammar and editing in daily is also essential to improve student’s learning. We end our sessions with free writing time in the form of a journal that the student and tutor will correspond though.

Study Skills and Executive Functioning Skills:
More information on these lessons coming soon. If you are interested in having your child work on these skills, please contact Kelly.