What Is A Reading Tutor?
A reading tutor can serve as a guide at the outset of a reader's literacy journey. We love being a part of that initial spurt of academic growth. One-on-one attention can make all the difference when a student seems to be struggling.
But reading is a skill like any other, one that can continue to be honed even into adulthood. We also help middle school and high school students develop strategies to improve their reading comprehension, showing them where to look for the critical information in a passage and how to keep track of arguments and ideas.
Our tutoring sessions often involve individualized, student-led projects on a subject of the student's choosing. These projects can involve both reading and writing elements, as well as time-management, accountability, and other study skills. In any case, we make sure our sessions are engaging and fun so we can build the sort of solid rapport that will ultimately be the most important element of the tutoring experience.
Phonics
The reading tutors here at Write Seattle are lifetime learners, and the question of whether or not to use a phonics-based approach to support young readers is one about which we have learned a great deal. In the past, teachers were often encouraged to take a "whole-word" approach to reading, one in which sounding out a word was underemphasized. The idea was that students needed to find a love of reading––who could argue with that?––and that being slowed down by phonics was an impediment. But these days the consensus is changing and teachers are learning that a wide range of students can benefit from a phonics-based approach to basic literacy. Allowing students to access the phonemic underpinnings of the language (i.e. helping them work through the sound elements of an unfamiliar word) has become the go-to approach of ELA teachers. And we've found that the assumptions of the past––that students find phonics boring or uninspiring––is often not true at all!
Elementary School Reading
This is the age at which the foundation for a reader's life is laid. We believe that the first task of a reading tutor is to help students discover the joy of reading in whatever way possible. Depending on the student's needs, we may develop extra-curricular projects that involve reading and writing about subjects in which they express interest, or work on phonics-based literacy development, or do all of the above. As with anything, there's no magic bullet, but practicing with an experienced reading tutor can help students develop confidence and make the most of their efforts.
Middle and High School Reading
For most students, middle school and high school are about perfecting established reading practices. Many students rush through their reading and come away without having absorbed the content. Others can't find the pleasure of reading anything that isn't on their phones. We help students change their habits of mind bit by bit, bringing equal parts rigor and unbridled enthusiasm to our lessons!
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One great resource to help middle and high school students improve reading comprehension is... studying for standardized tests! In spite of the (often deserved) disparagement of standardized testing as a method of student evaluation, the reading sections of the tests themselves––SSAT, ISEE, SAT, and ACT––make for great reading-comprehension assignments, even for students who don't plan to take those tests.
