Any suggestions for tutoring 3rd/4th graders

[SusanB-M1]

As I retired quite a time ago and taught mainly year 6, I am not up to date, but encouragement is important as has been said. May I recommend that you have a hunt around in staffroom cupboards, store rooms etc where you may well find work cards, books and various resources that have been bought and forgotten! (Moving schools one time, I found a whole set of maths games which must have cost a lot but which had obviously never been used, because there were sheets of card which needed cutting into cards and so on. For a time thereafter I would put these games out and the children in groups would play them - and learn quite a bit at the same time.)

I wonder whether comic verse might be a good idea? Ogden Nash, Spike Milligan, 'The Twits' by Roald Dahl for example.

 

[Trigood]

Hi everyone. I am so happy. Tutoring today went so well.

I realize now that I was needlessly/overly worried about "Pete's" reading skills. He can actually sound out words pretty well! Maybe he was having a bad day the other time. Anyway, the first thing I did was ask him to read something on the wall like NNobbs suggested, and he figured out the weird words "Campbell Labels"!! (He didn't seem to have ever read them before.)

First, we read Stone Soup together. (I did most of the reading but he did read a few pages, and sounded out unfamiliar words just fine.) It was just the right length and had lots of pictures, which appealed to Pete's visual side. He got engaged with the story, if partly in a negative sense (he hates potatoes so he hated the idea of the soup they made in the story, but I said it could be just the same story but using chicken and noodles like he prefers!). I feel that reading with him was a good way to encourage him and motivate him to enjoy reading more on his own.

Then we did flash cards. I'd made up a bunch with various pictures, but no words (not even on the reverse side, so he couldn't cheat ). I did a series of combos of threes. First I did "find the word that doesn't rhyme," such as bat, man, hat. He got that one pretty fast, and I asked him to convert "man" to a word that would rhyme by changing the sound at the end. It took him a second but he got it: "mat." I also did some initial sounds cards, involving blending/non-blending consonants, such as "dress," "doll," "drill" (also the "tr"/"t" contrast), and asked him to pick out the one with the different beginning sound. He struggled a bit with these, but it didn't take him long to catch on. In some cases, I had to ask him to write out the words on his slate before he figured it out. I think these exercises were good reinforcement for him, but also I think they were in some way at the edge of his skill level.

Then, he had about 10 minutes to draw on his whiteboard, which is his favorite thing. All in all, it went very well. I was so relieved that he does have the phonemic awareness levels and sounding out ability that I was afraid he didn't have. I also feel very good about reinforcing the pleasure of reading a good story.

So, I'm planning to continue on with similar activities in the next few weeks. Thanks to all of you for your encouragement and ideas!