Change for Kids

On Monday, I reviewed lists of sight words with my two tutees. They were generally able to recognize the words that they should know at their grade level. One problem I noticed though, however, is that they wanted to jump into saying the words out loud right away before properly pronouncing them out. I found that I had to constantly reinforce pronunciations of the different letters with them. After I finished the sight words with them, I read them books. These, however, were not just any reading books, which could get long and complicated. These were small reading books published by Scholastic. The benefits of reading these to them are that they are short to read, and the same two or more words are repeated over and over again. This is an excellent learning tool since my tutees would be able to recognize them much more easier if they have seen the same word for two or more times. Lastly, I worked with them on writing their own individual summaries of the book and what they enjoyed most about it. Before I left, the literary resource teacher went over with me new activities to engage the students in for my next tutoring session. She described one game that I can play with them, where words are written on index cards and are flipped over on the table. Each word in the pile has a double. The objective is for the student to be able to flip over a card and to be able to recognize it right away and to associate it as the missing one in the pair of the word he has on hand. This sounds like an interesting game! I look forward to my next tutoring session when I can actually utilize this method. Well, of course, the students will look forward to each tutoring session if there are interesting activities in store for them each time!