Tips for Tutoring Your Child / Home School Mom's Alphabet
Posted by: homenews <homenews@...>
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THE HOPE CHEST HOME SCHOOL NEWS
Special Back-to-School Mini-Issue
September 3, 2002
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Dear Hope Chest readers,
The next regular issue of the Hope Chest, on the theme of Life Skills, will come out on September 7, but I wanted to send you this separately. "Tips for Tutoring Your Child" and "The Home School Mom's Alphabet" are both suitable for reprinting in local home school newsletters or for forwarding to your friends or e-mail lists. (Just include my contact information, and send a copy of any reprints to me at 1925 Blossom Ln, Maitland, FL 32751.)
Hope Chest Contact information:
The Hope Chest Home School News is a free bi-monthly e-mail newsletter sent to over 1600 families around the world. So far, fifty issues have been published since February 1998. The editor is Virginia Knowles, veteran home school mom of eight children, author of the books The Real Life Home School Mom and Common Sense Excellence: Faith-Filled Home Education for Preschool to 5th Grade. Virginia has also designed a lesson planner and resource log called The Learner's Journal.
The Hope Chest Web Site: http://www.hopechest.homestead.com/welcome.html
Subscription address: [email protected]
Unsubscription address: [email protected]
Request back issues or contact Virginia: [email protected]
Get index of past Hope Chest messages: [email protected]
The Old Schoolhouse Magazine reviews of Common Sense Excellence and the Learner's Journal:
http://www.theoldhomeschoolhouse.com/home_study_helps_prod_rev.htm#Common Sense Excellence
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Tips for Tutoring Your Child
by Virginia Knowles
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What is tutoring? For the purposes of this article, tutoring is direct, personal teaching of academic skills. It is the time you spend with your child working through assignments.
Tutoring is going to be different for each family each year. When we first started home school kindergarten in 1992, I had the luxury of spending more individual time working with my oldest daughter while her little sisters played or napped. Now, in 2002, we have six school age children (grades K, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10), two preschoolers, and a baby on the way. We need new strategies! Our tutoring time needs to be more purposeful and focused.
Here are some ideas for you, no matter what ages and number of children you have.
1. Focus first on core subjects, such as math, reading, and writing skills. These are the foundation for any future learning, and require the most feedback. With good strong reading skills, children can handle more independent work in other school subjects.
2. If you have more than one child, and there is frequent conflict over who gets mom, consider scheduling time slots. This could be a regular schedule, or you could have a daily sign-up sheet. Each child may need a different amount of time with you. A kindergartner might work best with a few 15 minute increments spread throughout the day, while a high school student may need a solid hour to work through a tough math assignment. Do plan in some buffer time each hour so that you can attend to little things that come up with the other children, put laundry in the dryer, or make a quick phone call.
3. Work with a maximum of two children at any one time. It may help to focus primarily on one child, and allow the other child to ask for help only when you aren't working actively with the first child. The second child could have her "priority time" at another time.
4. Minimize distractions. Remind other siblings not to interrupt or make excessive noise. Find something quiet for the preschoolers to do, such as play with pattern blocks or color pictures. It may help to assign each older child a short period of watching your littles ones, perhaps by reading to them or doing some other easy educational activity. Turn off radios. Put the phone answering machine on. Work in the quietest spot you can.
5. Choose a good spot to work. The two favorite tutoring spots in our house are the couch (comfortable for a pregnant mom) and the dining room table. Wherever you go, you will need to have adequate light, space for your school materials, a surface to write against (such as a lap desk or large book), and a little elbow room for mom and child. Some of my children have plastic bins to tote their books to wherever we are working that day. This keeps them from running back and forth, and organizes everything in one spot on our school shelves.
6. Try to find out ahead of time of what you will be covering in a tutoring session. You may need to read ahead to make sure you understand the concepts well enough to explain them to your child. This will also help you know what extra materials you may need to gather, such as experiment supplies, math manipulatives, supplementary reading, answer keys, or worksheets to be copied.
7. Have your child do what they can on the assignment before the tutoring session, and just choose the more difficult parts to work through with you. (Or they could save the easy ones for later.) That way you won't be wasting your time. If you choose not to do this, bring along something quiet you can do during the in-between-questions times. This might include planning lessons, writing down records, reading a book, mending clothes by hand, or nursing a baby. When you are done with the lesson, you may wish to give an independent assignment for your child to complete while you work with the other children. Go over this briefly, and make sure there won't be any major trouble spots.
8. Bring a well-equipped supply box to your work area. I always like to have several sharpened pencils, a good eraser, lined and blank paper, and a portable writing surface -- for me! When I need to demonstrate a math problem, I find that my children don't like me to snatch their pencil and write on their work paper. It's better to have my own.
9. For math, it may help to use graph paper for your written work. This will help your child line up numbers for addition or multiplication, and makes it easy to draw graphs, diagrams, or geometric shapes. By middle school, most math curriculum requires the student to copy the problems on their own paper. Many home school veterans and classroom teachers recommend that students show all of their work (i.e. the steps to complete the problem) on their final paper, even if they need to use scratch paper for figuring it on in the first place. This is an excellent discipline, and definitely helps when you are trying to evaluate why a particular mistake was made, or whether your child was taking a shortcut that "worked this time" but might not be a good habit.
10. If you have the teacher manual, use it! Not all texts really require this, but they can certainly help, especially for quick grading. For example, when I do BJU Geometry with my oldest daughter, I always have the teacher manual open so I can follow along with her. Each page spread has reduced-size student pages, as well as teaching tips and answers to the problems on that page. I find the extra explanations valuable, since it has been nearly 25 years since I took Geometry in high school! I also look ahead to the quizzes and tests to make sure we have covered everything she is going to need. If there is something that hasn't been adequately explained or practiced in the lesson, I go over those concepts with her.
11. Demonstrate new skills and coach emerging skills. This may require a lot of repetition and patience. At first, you will be showing the skill step-by-step while your child watches. Later, you can do the skill while asking your child what to do next. Then you can have your child do the skill while you coach each step. Finally, you can watch your child do the skill, and give feedback at the end. This is a gradual transferral of the skill from parent to child. Depending on the material, this whole process may be accompllished in single tutoring session -- or it may happen over a period of days or even weeks.
12. Don't do all the work for the child. After the child has learned the skill using the above process, he should complete similar problems by himself, even if you have to make up extra ones to supplement the lesson. The child has not mastered the skill until he is able to do this. The goal is not to "get through the book" but to learn the material. (In other words, emphasize the learning process, not just the end product.) If you don't do this thoroughly, it will cause problems in the future with other knowledge to be built on this foundation. This is not to say that the child has to learn the skill completely before he can do anything else. It just means that you need to keep coming back to it until he can do it independently. If your child keeps asking the same "obvious answer" questions, you will need to discern whether he is being too lazy to think it through, or whether you need to teach it with a different approach so he will really "get it" at last.
13. Learn when to give feedback. Young children usually need more instant feedback. An older child might appreciate the opportunity to complete the problem or whole assignment, evaluate it himself, make his own changes, and then have you make comments. Be encouraging! Remember that Proverbs 16:21 says, "Pleasant words promote instruction."
14. Be aware of your child's weak spots in each school subject, so you can give extra (gentle) attention to those areas. Jot these down in a private place so you can periodically check back on progress. Mark any improvements in your child's record book, as appropriate. Many parents worry if their child is "up to grade level", and wonder when they need to do something drastic. Home schooling gives you the freedom to work at the child's level, which is going to be different for each person and each subject. If your child is making regular progress (even if it is a little slower than "normal"), if he is retaining the information and skills which you have already taught, and if he isn't getting too frustrated with the learning process, you are probably doing fine already. Just keep plugging away! If not, then start considering a change in approach.
15. Investigate learning modes so you can use appropriate teaching methods. Does your child learn best by hearing, seeing, doing, or some combination of these? Does he function best with sequential structured materials, or creative randomness? My friend Tonya Travelstead says, "Be sure to read Right-Brained Child in A Left-Brained World which covers the various ways that children learn. It provided me with numerous tips such as using color in teaching my energetic son. For example, instead of a spelling list, write one word in color on a single index card. If there is a problem with a particular diphthong or blend, only color that portion of the word. Visual learners can "see" the word easily in their minds when recalling how to spell it."
16. Insist on respect! Tutoring times can get pretty heated up with frustration if a child is struggling with either the material or his relationship with you. Refuse to work with a child who yells at you, speaks with disrespectful words or voice, damages his school materials, throws a tantrum, etc. Say, "If you can't stay calm, you won't understand anything I am trying to tell you." If your child continues to act up, put away the work, and tell the child you won't come back to it until he can act pleasantly. That doesn't mean he has to like the work. It just means that he can't take out his frustration on you. Will some children try to use this tactic as a way to get out of work? Probably. You may have to come up with some additional consequences, such as having to do the assignment by themselves during their free time, or doing extra assignments or housework, or whatever. However, there is very little point in continuing to help a child who is being nasty to you. You will both get more frustrated, and he won't learn anything effectively. Don't settle for second best when it comes to the emotional atmosphere of your tutoring session!
17. Don't be afraid to enlist help from others. This is not a sign of failure, but of resourcefulness! Options include your husband, one of your older children, a friend or relative, a private tutor (perhaps a talented high school student), or group classes. Education can be home-based without being home-bound. This year, five of our children will have group classes for about four hours each week, some of them in core academic subjects. At this season of life, I fully accept the fact that I'm not equipped to teach lab science at the middle school or high school level. Group classes can ease the teaching load when you find yourself in a major time crunch, or when you aren't confident in teaching a certain subject, or when a subject (such as debate) lends itself to group learning.
18. Set the example, and be a learner yourself! I enjoy learning and relearning the skills and concepts that I am teaching my children. Much of this happens "on the job" during our tutoring sessions, but I have also benefited from attending workshops or reading books and magazines to better equip me for teaching. If you would like to read a comprehensive subject-by-subject manual for teaching the preschool and elementary years, may I recommend my own book, Common Sense Excellence? (Visit the CSE web page at: http://www.hopechest.homestead.com/cse.html)
May God bless you as you teach and train your children at home!
** Copyright 2002 by Virginia Knowles
** Permission is given to forward or reprint for non-profit use, as long as you include the author's contact information.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~THE HOME SCHOOL MOM'S ALPHABET
by Virginia Knowles
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Accept, admire, affirm, and appreciate your family.
Boldly believe our big God for beautiful, bountiful blessings.
Calm courtesy communicates care and combats chaos.
Diligence and delegation dutifully do daily deeds.
Encourage by enthusiastic example.
Face, fix, forgive, and forget foolish faults.
Grace is given where grace is needed. Glory to God!
Have a happy, humorous, harmonious, hope-filled home school.
Include imagination, inspiration, and interesting information.
Juggle your jobs judiciously and joyfully.
Kiss your kids!
Listen, then lovingly lead.
Meet many marvelous mothers.
Notice new needs.
Overcome obnoxious offenses with optimism.
Pray, prioritize, plan & prepare for productivity & problem prevention.
Quick and quiet, not dawdling or riot.
Rules without relationships reap rebellion.
Serve sacrificially.
Take time to teach and train truthfulness and thankfulness.
Understand until united.
Virtuosity is victorious.
Wise words will win.
Xpect excellence.
Yackety yack, no talking back.
Zippety doo-dah, zippety ay, my oh my what a wonderful day!
** Copyright 2000 by Virginia Knowles
** Permission is given to forward or reprint for non-profit use, as long as you include the author's contact information.