Maybe you’ve seen those commercials from a competing tutoring company, in which a child tilts over and all of the numbers and letters spill out of his head at the end of the school year? When many children come back to school after the summer, it takes months to get them back to where they were at the end of the previous year. Retention of reading and writing skills is crucial as children move from…
For many Kindergarten students who are having difficulty learning how a letter looks, it is important to try many different types of reading strategies, including one that young children are great at—jumping around! For a Kindergarten student in Chelmsford, MA, I created a variation on the game Twister: I wrote letters on the spots, and when I called out “Put your foot on the letter that makes the sound [sound of the letter T],” the…
In many preschool and Kindergarten classrooms, the relationship between how a letter looks and how it sounds is taught by showing the child pictures of objects, telling them the name of the object, and then telling them what letter the object starts with (‘cat’ starts with C, ‘dog’ starts with D). Some children just do not gain language acquisition in this way; what if they just can’t remember that ‘cat’ starts with C? When children…
Taking the SAT is a stress-ridden experience. There are challenging questions and a clock ticking away. One technique that was helpful for a student that I worked with in Sudbury, MA, was to rearrange the order of how she attacked each Verbal section. The Verbal section begins with five to eight sentence completions, followed by several short passages and questions, and then ending with at least one very long passage with its own set of…
When working with young students on organizing a five-paragraph essay, a visual analogy is key. Take the cheeseburger. They’ve all had one, they all know the joy that is a greasy, dripping burger topped with melting cheese on a sesame seed bun…that bun perfectly sandwiching the meat and cheese in grilled harmony…And, yes, an essay is stacked just like that cheeseburger. You’ve got the bun–without it, what holds the burger together? This is your introduction…
