What's for breakfast?

Today, I need to eat breakfast.  I cannot do eggs again.  I had them too many days last week.  I have had no sugar or flour for two weeks now.  I lost 5.4 pounds last week.  I had potato chips yesterday.  I know I cannot have chips for breakfast very often.  I want to be healthy also.  Well since I cannot figure out what
to have for breakfast, I guess I will fix rice for the freezer.  I also started baked potatoes in the crock pot for supper. I could have a spoon of almond butter or sunflower butter, but then I would still be hungry.
Well, my pan of rice turned out nicely and is cooling.  I know I will put a tablespoon of almond butter in a bowl of rice. I ate that and have felt well all morning and now I can think enough to do my errands.  Now it is time for lunch and I feel well.  What a nice feeling.

tutoring a tired child

Today the child I tutor was tired.  Today could have been a miserable time.  We started off working with the hands on fractions.  These are plastic pieces that are whole, then halves, then thirds and so on. This child needed to relax.  She was tired from school.  Later she said her eyes were tired. After she played with the fraction pieces we read out of the rocket phonics book.  She missed several words. I think it was because her eyes were tired.  We went back to playing concentration with the letter sound cards from rocket phonics.
We had graduated from these but when I am tired I make more mistakes and this child needed a little more
support. All in all we had a successful tutoring session. We will review more so there is a little more confidence built.

My defination of a tutor

Today, I was in an office and talking about some of my teaching materials.  Someone said, "Oh you are a
teacher."  I replied, "No, I am a tutor."  What is the difference?  Sometimes some teachers do tutor outside of the formal school classroom.  A teacher is too often required to teach to the test.  He or she has to fill out
too much paperwork.  The teacher is required to teach from books that may or may not be best for each student.  If a student needs a different teaching method, often the teacher does not have the time or is not
allowed to teach differently.  Yes there are exceptions to this but it is too often too true.
A tutor can choose to tutor a student or not.  How often can a teacher refuse a student?  A tutor can chose what material to use.  A teacher is often told what material to use.. A parent can change tutors. How hard is it  for a parent to change a student out of a poor teacher's class.  Sometimes, a good teacher and a student will have a personality clash. How hard is it to change that student or teacher.  A tutor can go as slow or as fast as needed to help the student.  A teacher has between 20 and 30 students/  It stretches me to work with 3. 
The students I work with are struggling in the classroom and often need one on one help.  My hat is off to the teachers who do a great job of teaching. Hopefully the students who need more help can find a good tutor also.

group tutoring

Today I worked with a group of three sisters again. I began by teaching them about sudoku.  I used 4 squares to begin.  When I tried 6 squares, it was too confusing. We will work on this again next week.
I have some stamps that will make this more hands on for the girls.
It is so exciting to see how much the rocket phonics work.  I tried letting the girls play concentration
by themselves and the older two do fine. I will need to work with the youngest one (2nd grade) more
one on one.  The older girl is doing well with understanding the stories in rocket phonics.  We began
working on Math U See today.  We began by letting the girls play with the hands on blocks.  I wanted  to
see how much they understood the base 10 concept.The oldest girl understood the 10 blue strips of ten
to make the red 100 block.  She also did well with finding which ones add up to 10.  I am not sure why
she is struggling with math.  The younger girls will need more help. Working with three at a time is more exhausting for me but seems to be easier for them.

Tongue Twisters

One little boy is struggling with saying some of his words correctly.  I suggested to his mom that she work with him learning to say the tongue twisters.  We discussed some ideas and she came up with a good idea for her child.  This is why parents need to be involved with their child's education, regardless of where they officially go to school.  There are things and ideas that a parent will know for their child that it takes a tutor or teacher too long to figure out. Someone in the day to day parenting role will just have more opportunity to know the child. I will get her the tongue twisters and she will put them on his ipod to listen to on his way to and from school. 

Color Me Pink

Back to reporting on the child I am tutoring individually.  Yesterday, I used cards on pink, yellow and red paper.  Each card had a word on the most used word list.  Each card also had a matching card.  We used these to play concentration.  We turn over 4 to 6 cards each turn to hurry the game.  There were 32 cards total and 16 different words.  I allowed her to pick the first color deck.  She chose pink and the game was fun and she enjoyed herself.  Then I chose yellow to see how she would do.  The game was not fun, she struggled and it took much longer.  She seemed tired at the end of the game.  Her mother and I agreed to try putting her spelling words on pink paper when she is learning them to see if it makes things easier.  I am pushing her in the rocket phonics book as she is doing well.  We finished page 86.  The words are in blue with the phonic sound under the word when it is different from the spelling.  Also the picture helps with comprehension because you decide if the group of words is in the picture. This is a second grade child who is 8.  We should finish the first section of rocket phonics next tutor session and begin Level 2.  She is doing so well that instead of giving stickers during tutoring I give her a full page at the end.  We plan to have less stickers with Level 2 as she should not need them.  She gave me two stickers because I am such a good tutor.  Such an enjoyable child teach.

Tutoring Day 11

Yesterday was Day 11 working with this child.  She has an excellent memory and memorizes things so well, it interferes with her reading.  You will think she is reading when she is parroting something she read a few days earlier.  I had her read a story we had read earlier and she was doing so well,. I was surprised until I realized she had memorized the story.  I figured this out when the words did not match a time or two. She sounded just like she was reading.  We had discussed the story enough that she understood the meaning and could appear to read. We had only read it once. We will not read another story twice for a long time.  I change things around so she will not become so used to my routine that she does a routine instead of learning the material.  It is challenging to stay ahead of her but also why  I tutor.  I added some different Tangram puzzles and they were too hard.  She was doing the other Tangram's so well, I thought she was ready for these. I have missed something here so I will go back and find where she memorized what we were doing.  I dropped the ball when I did not realize she memorized the puzzles instead of understanding them. It is so exciting and fun to teach her. Next week, we are off from tutoring so we can rest and regroup.  Hopefully, I can write up some other tutoring I have done with some other students.