Getting a tutor as or before school gets underway can kick your child's learning into high gear after summer! Beyond helping your children comprehend what they’re learning or will be learning in school, tutors play a much more critical role in setting the foundations necessary to make learning easier and more enjoyable. Our experienced after school tutors can teach study skills, can make learning fun and teach to fit your child’s learning style. This can help your child or teen get used to school quicker and start the year ahead!

We offer free, no obligation test prep tutoring consultations with one of our directors who will provide recommendations for your family.

Getting A Club Z! Tutor As School Starts Will Make This Year Your Best. Our Tutors Teach Good Study Skills That Will Make Learning Easier In Every Subject All Year Long!

1.      Teach organizational skills

After school tutoring can teach your children organizational skills that they have yet to learn, to give them a strong start in the new school year. They can also give your child a refresher in organization if he’s already organized, but is out of practice from a long summer break. During summer breaks, children and teens are responsible for much less than they are during the school year. A student who has impressive organizational skills during the year may not be as great in the fall until she returns fully to school mode after a couple of months in. After school tutors can help establish best practices in organization that can help time with any subject in school.

            Types Of Organizational Skills After School Tutoring Can Teach

a.      Prioritization – Knowing how to prioritize tasks in different ways is an important skill that will help your child meet deadlines more easily in school and later on in his future job. After school tutoring can teach your child or teen how to prioritize by due date, time needed and difficulty of tasks.

b.      Divide & Conquer – After school tutors can help teach your child to tackle large overwhelming projects by dividing them in to smaller and more manageable tasks.

c.       Materials Organization – It’s important for students to learn how to organize study materials and supplies, so they don’t waste time looking for what they need. Imagine how much more difficult studying for a test can be when a student spends the first 5 hours sorting through a stack of papers to find worksheets and calling friends to borrow notes! After school tutors can set standards for organization with your child or teen and can teach her tips and tricks to allow her to live up to these standards.

d.      Calendar Management – Many of us may not remember how tough it was to learn how to keep a calendar and manage it. It’s not only the due dates that we have to manage. We also have to manage changes in times/dates. We have to set reminders for ourselves in advance to enable us to start working on projects early enough to finish by the deadline. These skills that come second nature to us now were learned skills that took a while to develop. After school tutoring can help students develop these skills and become great at them before they go off to college and have to manage without our help.

e.      To Do Lists – Making effective to-do lists is also an important part of growing up, and your after-school tutors can help your child. Anyone can make a simple list, but nobody is born with the ability to effectively prioritize that list, set effective reminders, change the list according to our needs and, most of all, not lose the list!

f.        Whiteboarding – After school tutoring can help your child learn how to visually map out more complex assignments and projects so he can develop a deeper understanding of how to accomplish them. Whiteboarding is very useful in high school and college, and even more useful in the professional world. After school tutors can help your child learn this skill now so she will master it early and be ahead of the game!

g.      Execution Planning – Most projects need a plan of attack, and developing these types of plans is something after school tutors can teach your child to do. Execution plans help students maximize use of their time and make sure they don’t waste time by doing the wrong tasks first or doing them incorrectly and having to redo them.

2.      Help kids comprehend instructions well

After school tutoring is a great opportunity for kids to learn reading comprehension. Every child goes through that phase when the ability to read a sentence out loud or in her head and the ability to understand what it’s truly saying aren’t one in the same.

Many students struggle with true reading comprehension through high school and don’t become efficient at it until college. This can cause problems, especially when they have to write essays about something they read, answer questions about it and, most of all, comprehend instructions on tests and homework in all subjects. This last point is important. Poor reading comprehension can not only hurt a student’s English scores, but it can also hurt scores in math, science and all other subjects.

After school tutors are experienced in teaching reading comprehension strategies, and can help your child ask the right questions in her mind to ensure she understands what she’s reading while she’s reading it! 

3.      Reinforce positive thinking

Looking at learning in a positive light may seem warm and fuzzy and fun, but the reality is that it’s absolutely necessary to make learning feasible for students. After school tutors can teach students how to think about learning and also reassure them that their struggles are normal…even among the most intelligent students.

Students who are struggling in a certain subject usually end up frustrated and their self-confidence is harmed. This feeds a cycle of further frustration and negative thoughts about themselves, which completely shuts their brains off to learning.

After school tutors can set the stage for positive thinking. For example, if a student gets a problem wrong because he does the second part of it incorrectly, he may be thinking on his own, “I did the problem wrong. I’m bad at this.” A tutor can say things like, “You tackled the first part of that question perfectly!

Now, let me teach you a trick on the second part.” This reinforced positive thinking is infectious. It can rub off on children and teens easily…especially when it doesn’t come from their parent (because they’re so used to hearing feedback from their parents, that they become somewhat immune to it).

4.      Learn Test Taking & Study Strategies

After school tutoring can help your child learn effective test taking and study strategies. Most students, if they even care about grades at all, will follow the strategy: study everything you learned and hope to do well on the test. Then, they quickly realize that this isn’t always possible to study everything they learned and that doing well on tests requires students to do more than know the material.

It requires them to be comfortable with the test and comfortable predicting what the test will cover. This is why after school tutors can help with the following strategies:

a.      Question Comprehension – We mentioned this above, but it's worth repeating!

b.      Format Comfort – Being comfortable with the format of the test can earn more points and even a higher letter grade for students. Answering multiple choice is very different than answering True/False, essays, short answer and matching questions. Students need to study very differently for different types of questions, and after school tutors can teach them how to do that.

c.       Time Management – Most tests are timed, and because of this, it’s best for students to do certain types of questions before other types in order to ensure that they accumulate the most points possible early on in the test. After school tutors will teach students how to manage time during the test, which questions to do first and which to leave for last.

d.      Guessing – No matter how hard students study, they will always have to guess at least some of the time. Making educated guesses about questions they’re unsure how to answer can accumulate a lot of points. After school tutoring is the perfect opportunity to allow students to learn smart guessing strategies (such as how to use process of elimination, and how to use information from elsewhere in the test to their advantage).

e.       Confident Answering – Second guessing and skittishness on tests can be the kiss of death to any test score. After school tutors can help nervous students combat this and learn to trust their guts when all else fails.

f.        Thought Organization – On essay and short answer questions, the ability to organize thoughts before writing is key to answering questions correctly and to avoiding writing tangents that are off topic and waste time. After school tutoring can help your child or teen become an expert at answering essay questions!

g.      Clear Expression – After school tutors can help your child or teen learn how to express herself clearly in writing so that her answers on tests aren’t misinterpreted. We can’t count how many times students’ answers are marked wrong just because they failed to express their answers clearly enough in writing. After school tutors can design drills and practice tests to help your child or teen overcome this!

After School Tutoring Can Focus on Your Child’s Unique Needs

The Way Schools Can’t

The types of strategies above definitely help students excel in school and tutors are experts in teaching them. Despite this, one obvious fact is this: students of all ages learn best when they don’t hate what they’re learning and when they learn in their own learning styles. After school tutoring can pair your child with a tutor who knows how to make learning more fun and engaging. After school tutors can teach in a way that your child or teen learns best. 

After School Tutors Can Help Make Learning Enjoyable

Our after school tutors are well-equipped with fun games and exercises to encourage your child or teen to view learning as fun. Whether your child needs a math tutor, reading tutor, writing tutor or help in any other subjects, there are plenty of ways for her to learn to love learning and our after school tutors can help meet that goal. Aside from games and interesting exercises, our after school tutors can also design rewards systems to motivate your child or teen to improve.  Lastly, tutors can design learning plans to fit your child’s learning style, and can help you diagnose your child’s learning style if you don’t know it already.

After School Tutoring Can Be Designed To Fit Your Child’s Learning Style

Diagnosing learnings style is more complex than, “My child loves to draw so he’s visual,” or “She loves music, so her style is aural.” Often, parents will be surprised when they find out what their children’s true learning styles are. Finding out early and learning the best study methods for your child’s learning style will benefit your her through her entire academic career. The earlier you know, the better!

After School Tutors Teach To Different Learning Styles

Teachers don’t have much leeway with how they teach, due to state mandated curricula. This leaves students in the dust any time a concept is taught in class in a way that doesn’t match their learning style. This is where after school tutors can help. They can re-design lessons in your child’s learning style and teach them to him in a way that will allow him to understand and retain the information! 

Here Are The Different Learning Styles:

a.      Visual Learning 

As you can guess, visual learners learn by seeing. Those who learn best visually can struggle with foreign languages or any subjects that involve a lot of abstract ideas that aren’t taught using visual aids and diagrams. Sometimes, it can be hard to draw or make a model of a language or an abstract concept, but this is where after school tutoring can help.

Your child’s tutor is focused on only her, not 30 other students (like teachers are), so the tutor has the time, focus and expertise available to convert those tough-to-teach lessons into visual aids and drawings that help your child learn!

E.g. Writing tutors can demonstrate sentence diagrams and parts of speech by having a child actually build a sentence with blocks. For example, writing tutors can tell students blue blocks are verbs, red blocks are nouns, etc. and have them build sentence structures to match ones they read. For more advanced students, writing tutors can use diagrams and drawings to help students plan out their written assignments to help them present ideas logically.

E.g. Reading tutors can have children draw out the plot of a story to allow them to internalize what’s really happening. Reading tutors can also have students draw out a hierarchy of characters so they understand who is most important and what their relationships are with one another.

E.g. Math tutors can help demonstrate abstract concepts by drawing diagrams on paper if needed, but math itself is a visual subject, so math tutors of visual learners have an easier job here.

b.      Kinaesthetic Learning

Kinaesthetic learners learn best by using their hands and bodies. Anything activity that allows a student to act something out, demonstrate concepts with her own body, build models or touch objects is best for these types of learners. This learning style is one teachers don’t often accommodate because curricula don’t allow it, and necessary resources aren’t always available. After school tutoring can introduce your child to a whole new world of learning by doing, and help your kinaesthetic learner excel in school as a result.

E.g. Reading tutors can help with reading comprehension by having a child act out passages from the book. Both reading tutors and writing tutors can also have children act out or build what they’re writing about in the form of blocks, clay, etc. to make learning easier.

E.g. Math tutors can help children build math equations using different sized blocks to conceptualize subjects like algebra, geometry and arithmetic. Tiles, rods and counting pieces are also great tools that math tutors use.

c.       Aural Learning 

Aural learners learn by hearing. They learn through music, stories told out loud, rhymes and jingles. An after school tutor who can convert concepts into sounds to demonstrate their meaning would be perfect for an aural learner. Our Club Z! after school tutors can do just that.

E.g. Writing tutors can help students tell stories out loud about what they want to write to help them better organize their thoughts before writing essays.

E.g. Reading tutors can have children read passages loud, so they can hear what they read, and retain it easily.

E.g. Math tutors can make up jingles or sayings for different math formulas and concepts to help students both memorize and understand. There are plenty of these that exist in math already (like PEMDAS: Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally), and they’re quite useful! 

d.      Verbal Learning

The verbal learning style similar to aural learning, but relies more heavily on working with words and manipulating words than it does on sounds. It’s easy to imagine how a reading tutor or writing tutor would help a verbal child. The opportunities are endless and, as a matter of fact, for many verbal learners, reading and writing are what they do best! Math tutors, on the other hand, may have to be creative in how they teach.

E.g. Math tutors could help a verbal child by verbally explaining math problems, but being very focused on how they explain and what words they use. Explaining math to a verbal learner requires practice and expertise because verbal learners pick up on slight nuances that others don’t. These nuances help them understand what’s being said even better than most people can.

The disadvantage is that if the instructions have any ambiguity in them or the slightest error, this can completely throw off a verbal learners understanding of the problem, while other types of learners may not even notice the nuance. Our after school tutors and math tutors are skilled at explaining math to verbal learners and can help your child understand and excel!
 

Tutoring Makes Learning More Enjoyable & Efficient

The examples of learning above are just some of the most basic examples of how an experienced tutor can help children learn according to their unique needs. Typically, designing tutoring sessions to fit a student's needs is much more involved than using the methods we mentioned. As you can see, expert tutoring isn't the same as having an older child or a parent look over a student's shoulder and help with assignments/quiz him on material for tests. Expert tutoring exists for the purpose of changing learning for your child...and making learning more enjoyable, effective and efficient. Allowing a student to learn in a way that she learns best and in a way that she enjoys will give her the best chance at academic success now and in the future.