THIS ISSUE: Tutoring Strategies for Children

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In this issue of the Promising Practices Forum we have bee asked to provide tips for tutoring children. Designed for the primary grades, these tips can help improve the overall success of children.

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Promising Practice Research and Tips

Tutoring Strategies for the Primary Grades

Whether reading to a child, share reading, or listening to a child read aloud, there are many strategies a tutor can use to improve the skills of a young reader.

Reading together

Many tutoring programs use a scaffolding strategy that calls for tutors and children to read together.

Explicit modeling

Helps children learn to think about what they already know while they are reading.

Implicit modeling

Helps children think while they read (suggest strategies).

Choral reading

Helps children become more fluent and confident readers (read together.

Echo reading

Helps children develop confidence and fluency (read aloud).

Paired Reading

Allows tutors to vary the amount of support they provide to a child while reading aloud together.

Helping children develop decoding strategies

Engaged readers automatically use decoding, or cueing, strategies to figure out new words in text.

Focus on the meaning

Young readers often figure out a new word by thinking about what would make sense in a sentence or story.

Relate sounds to letters

Children apply what they already know about the relationships between letters and sounds to read a new word.

Look at how words and phrases are formed

You can help a child read an unfamiliar compound word by demonstrating how to break it down into its parts.

Recognize sight words

When a child masters high-frequency sight words (about 50 percent of the words we read); he experiences success.

Use multiple cues

You can model how to use several decoding systems at one time as problem solving strategies for determining how to read an unfamiliar word.

 

Helping children understand what they read

Reading involves making sense of the written word; some children pronounce words correctly and read with apparent ease, but don't know the meaning of what they have read.

You can encourage a child to talk about what she has read, by pointing out new words and explaining their meaning, and by using strategies such as the K-W-L approach to help children understand what they read.

   K – What I know.

Help the child list what he already knows about a topic that is discussed in a book he is going to read.

   W –What I want to know.

Help the child think of some questions he has about this topic and add them to the chart.

   L – What I learned or still need to learn.

Explain that while he reads the book – alone or with you – he can think about what he is learning. After the reading, discuss the book and add what was learned to the chart along with any information he still needs to learn.

Helping children become engaged writers

As children become more skilled readers, they also improve their writing skills. The opposite is also true – writing contributes to growth in phonics, spelling, word recognition, memory, and reading comprehension. Tutors can also adapt a writing workshop approach used in the primary grades.

Choosing a topic

Drafting

Revising

Conferencing

Sharing

Editing

Publishing