Are you hoping your child can get a little extra help in reading this year after school? Here are some suggestions for finding someone to help your child at the end of the school day. How about your child’s teacher? First stop is your child’s classroom or reading teacher. It can be very convenient if they tutor right there at school. Also, their familiarity with your child’s reading strengths and weaknesses make them an optimal choice for tutoring. Or take tutor recommendations from the teacher. If your child’s teacher is unavailable for tutoring, the next best choice might be someone...
What a time for early literacy tutors! Because of the last two years of COVID and the so-called learning gap, tutors are in great demand right now. Isn’t it wonderful to know that we can help? But, due to the changes in our students’ lives during the pandemic, we might want to tweak our approach to teaching beginning readers. (more…)
What a time for early literacy tutors! Because of the last two years of COVID and the so-called learning gap, both in-person and online tutors are in great demand right now. Many studies have shown a loss of achievement in reading as a result of the pandemic, especially for at-risk populations. I’m not here to argue about the reasons that many students are behind academically or the extent of the learning gap. Instead, I want to focus on how you can help as a tutor of beginning readers. In many ways, these suggestions are just what I would recommend for...
Don’t you love getting ready to tutor a new student? You look forward to getting to know this youngster as a reader, and as a person, too. It’s wonderful to anticipate using your own teaching strengths to help someone else experience the joy of literacy. Aren’t we reading teachers the luckiest people in the world? (more…)
Did you think you would be tutoring online? I didn’t! But meeting in person with our young students is no longer possible, now that we are “socially distancing.” Yes, transitioning to online tutoring is a new adventure! I want to briefly share with you my path and encourage you to take the leap, if you haven’t already. (more…)
Remember Liza? If you read that previous Liza post, you met that preschooler when she was at the earliest stage of learning to read—the Pre-Alphabetic stage. She knew a few letters but no letter sounds, so reading was primarily a visual matching task for her. If she remembered any words, it was usually through partial visual cues, such as associating the word look with two eyes in the middle. Now we will see how Liza moved on to the next stage. As she began to learn a few letter sounds she progressed into the Partial-Alphabetic phase. Although not able to...
Tutoring reading is wonderful because you can concentrate on the needs of one child at a time. But it’s important to figure out what to focus on in each brief lesson. I say “brief” because some young readers can only concentrate for half an hour at a time. And even an hour seems short, if the parent wants only one lesson a week. (Sadly, once-a-week tutoring arrangements are becoming increasingly common, as children are engaged in more and more activities.) Yes, tutoring time is precious, so it’s important to be clear about what your focus is for each lesson. (more…)
Meet Liza. Liza was “reading” a book. The text said: I see a puppy. Liza read: “Look at the little dog.” She could match the meaning of the text to the illustrations because she heard the language pattern during the book introduction, but she was not yet ready to match her voice to the text, or to monitor her attempts phonetically. Thus, she made semantic errors (errors that match meaning). Liza was a Pre-Alphabetic reader. Young children go through different stages as they learn to read. When we figure out the stage a student is on, we can adjust...
Some educators argue that teaching children to memorize sight words encourages guessing. But is there a place for teaching sight words? I believe there is. What are sight words, anyway? The term is often confused with high frequency words and irregular or nonphonetic words. These categories overlap, for sure, but sight words are simply words that can be immediately recognized as wholes, without being decoded. There are several reasons why I teach sight words to beginning readers. (more…)
The days are getting longer. Spring will be here before you know it—then summer. Some people are shopping for warm weather clothes. Others are looking forward to spring break. But then there are those of us who are beginning to think about… summer tutoring! (more…)
Boo! I love teaching guided reading at Halloween time—especially to emergent readers! I’d like to share some of my teaching points and materials with you. Most kindergartners and 1st graders like to be a little bit scared, but, even more than that, they love to scare adults! This is why they are eager to learn to read and write boo, and much of my teaching this time of the year centers around the word. Boo! (more…)
Guided reading time is so precious! Don’t you agree? As a classroom teacher, it was one of the few times I got to observe my students up close. Even as a reading specialist I was hyper protective of my guided reading sessions. (Just ask the classroom teachers I worked with…I probably drove them crazy! Ha-ha!) During my years of teaching guided reading, I’ve come up with a number of techniques and materials to make the best of that special instructional time. I’ll share a few of those with you. (more…)
Spring is here…Yea! Welcome to a repeat edition of Book Box. Here again is a themed list of leveled books, this time about spring. Two of my favorite authors are Kris Bonnell and Michele Dufresne. We authors of leveled readers learn from each other–and from the kids, of course! Thank you, Kris and Michele, for your wonderful books. Happy Spring, everybody!
