Boston Tutoring Services: Tell me a little about your organization. Pamela Civins: Boston Partners in Education (Boston Partners) has been contributing to the academic achievement of Boston’s public schools students since 1966. We mobilize volunteer academic mentors to assist struggling K-12 students in reading, writing, and math. In high school, our volunteers also support students struggling in science. Academic mentors help students gain the skills, self-confidence, and motivation they need to succeed in school and…
One of the best ways to improve early literacy skills is to allow children to make connections across a variety of texts. When a child reads the word ‘you’ in one book, but can’t remember the word when they come across it again, have the first book available to show to the child and let them know that they were able to read the word in that context. They will be able to retrieve the…
When early readers begin to take on new literacy skills, it is important to remember that they need to assimilate a new rule into their repertoire before they can learn the variations on this rule. For example, when teaching young children that adding an ‘e’ to the end of a word turns a short vowel sound (a as in apple) into a long vowel sound (a as in cake), let them fully accomplish the use…
Now Offering Academic Support for the Summer: Information about our Summer Savings Package Loss of academic skills during the summer is a problem that all students face. In each grade, students can expect to lose some of the skills and information they have gained over the past school year, and face the coming September with a setback that can take several months to recover from. So that your child will not start their next school…
With so many parents holding their children back from entering Kindergarten, the average age of Kindergarteners continues to rise, which means that the standards for achievement do as well. In today’s schools, Kindergarteners are expected to be reading and writing from the get-go. As the following article describes, parents are holding their kids back from entering school so that they can perform to higher and higher standards, which puts every child who is not a…
When working with a Kindergarten student in Chelmsford, MA who was having trouble learning how to read, I started with the basics: what are the sounds that you hear in a word? A child needs to be able to isolate each sound so that he can figure out what letter represents that sound. One of the best ways to begin teaching phonics is to use small objects that begin with each letter. I use these…
Maybe you’ve seen those commercials from a competing tutoring company, in which a child tilts over and all of the numbers and letters spill out of his head at the end of the school year? When many children come back to school after the summer, it takes months to get them back to where they were at the end of the previous year. Retention of reading and writing skills is crucial as children move from…
For many Kindergarten students who are having difficulty learning how a letter looks, it is important to try many different types of reading strategies, including one that young children are great at—jumping around! For a Kindergarten student in Chelmsford, MA, I created a variation on the game Twister: I wrote letters on the spots, and when I called out “Put your foot on the letter that makes the sound [sound of the letter T],” the…
In many preschool and Kindergarten classrooms, the relationship between how a letter looks and how it sounds is taught by showing the child pictures of objects, telling them the name of the object, and then telling them what letter the object starts with (‘cat’ starts with C, ‘dog’ starts with D). Some children just do not gain language acquisition in this way; what if they just can’t remember that ‘cat’ starts with C? When children…
