I have always considered myself as an advocate to helping students who need one on one teaching to understand and apply skills necessary to be successful. After 35 years of teaching, I've had lot of experiences working with students from Kindergarten through 5th grade in all subject areas. I have also spent many years working with students whose first language is not English. These years have been very rewarding.
I use a variety of strategies to help the students in reading, math, science and social studies. For many students, the typical teaching styles in classrooms don't match with their learning styles. Incorporating more hands on activities, many students gain a stronger understanding of math and science concepts. One on one teaching environments, provide the student with less interruptions and the needed assistance without waiting.
To improve reading proficiency, I believe that automaticity of vocabulary, reading at the appropriate level and strong comprehension stills are critical to success. I use timed reading drills to work to improving correct words per minutes. Appropriate comprehension questioning and responses and having the students create a sequence of events to help develop students remember the events of a passage from beginning to end.
My tutoring of students in math begins with an assessment of common math facts and the time to correct response ratio. Student who do not have the quick response to mathematical facts, will continue to fall behind. As a tutor, it would be important to determine the incoming skill level of the student and move from there forward. As the basic skills improve, moving up into higher levels of computation skills and problem solving skills would be appropriate.
As for the length of a tutoring session, I am a strong advocate that the session should be no less than 30 minutes and no longer that 60 minutes per subject and 2 subjects could be covered at the 30 minute session.
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