How to Improve Your Child’s Reading Comprehension
Knowing how to read, and knowing how to understand what you have read, are vital skills. According to a recent study, a shocking twenty-three percent of students who had a below basic reading level in third grade did not graduate high school by age 19. Students who were in the top tercile, on the other hand, not only did better in language arts, they also did better in science and math.
Clearly, a student’s reading comprehension is strongly correlated with academic success in general, which is why improving your child’s reading skills is essential for preparing them for long-term success not only in academics, but in every area of life. But what is reading comprehension, and how can students cultivate this skill?
Reading vs. Reading Comprehension: Understanding the Difference
By the time they are in middle school, most Canadian children are relatively fluent in reading and writing. Despite recent slippage, Canada still has a relatively high literacy rate when compared to the rest of the world, and it is rare for students to pass through the education system and not emerge with some basic ability to read and write.
But fluency is not the same as comprehension, and a person who can read a text may not necessarily be able to grasp much of what it communicates. Reading comprehension is the cluster of skills that allow a child to work their way through a text and understand both particular details and the bigger picture, and it is essential for doing everything from filling out a form at Service Ontario to composing a university admissions essay.
Reading comprehension is hard to quantify, but it is something that many students struggle with right up to university. And because reading is the bedrock skill on which just about every other aspect of education rests, comprehension is arguably the most important skill a child will acquire in their first decade of schooling.
So how do you help your children become more analytic readers? One of the first things you should do is keep your child reading this summer — the easiest way to help children develop reading comprehension skills, especially at the elementary level, is simply to get them to read as much as possible.
But if your children are already reading regularly, or if you have a hard time getting them to actually engage with what they are reading, there are things you can do help them sharpen their ability to grasp the full meaning of a text.
4 Strategies for Developing Reading Comprehension
Unlike fluency, reading comprehension isn’t simply about learning to translate the words into writing. That means that when it comes to improving reading comprehension, you need to use a variety of different approaches. Here are four strategies that are proven to be effective.
- Engage your children about what they are reading. As cognitive psychologists like Teun A. van Dijk and Walter Kintsch discovered in the 1970s, being able to succinctly restate the main points of a text or story is an essential component of comprehension. By encouraging children and teenagers to talk about what they are reading, you will activate the parts of their brain engaged in processing a text.
In particular, getting them to summarize a book or story they have read is a great way to sharpen the critical faculties on which comprehension relies.
- Incorporate a range of tools. All-too-often, reading comprehension practice is about little more than answering questions about a text. While questions can be a useful way into a story, and especially for more advanced readers may be an essential way to tease out nuance, for plenty of children, this text-heavy approach is not particularly helpful.
Using diagrams, story maps, and visual images can help students understand the story in a way that makes sense for them. Trying out a variety of different tools also helps children to understand that comprehension is not simply about finding the right answer, but about creating an integrated understanding of what is going on in a given text.
- Get tutoring help. Helping students develop their reading comprehension skills is hard to do without one-on-one feedback and support, and in today’s crowded classrooms this is in short supply. The brightest students in the class often lead the way with reading comprehension, and can make slower and more methodical children reticent to speak up if they are afraid that they will expose their ignorance by doing so.
Giving your child the opportunity to work through a text with the help of a tutor who knows how to implement effective pedagogical strategies while also being a friendly and non-judgmental presence can go a long way toward helping develop their understanding and their confidence. If you want to find a local tutor today and you live in the Greater Toronto Area, Prep Academy can connect you with tutors who can help your child develop their reading comprehension skills at home.
- Make reading social. You can’t make your child enjoy reading, but you can create the conditions in which a love of reading is more likely to bloom. If your children are still quite young, reading to them before bed is a great way to normalize reading and encourage them to view reading as a legitimate form of entertainment, and also gives you the opportunity to make it an interactive experience by asking comprehension questions. If you have older children, reading the same books as them will give you an opportunity to engage them in conversation about what they are reading and what they think about it.
While it is never too late to improve reading comprehension, establishing good reading habits and strong analytic skills early provides children with a huge advantage.
If you want to make sure your child’s comprehension abilities don’t flag over the summer, employ these four strategies to make sure they continue to build on their knowledge of reading, and get in touch with Prep Academy Tutors to learn more about how tutoring can help children who are struggling with a broad range of literacy problems.
Exam Study Tips That Can Really Make a Difference
The further along in their education a child progresses, the more essential for developing the skills to do well on exams becomes. Exams are a central part of the curriculum in middle schools and high schools across Ontario, and in many cases, a significant portion of a student’s final grade will be a result of how well they do on mid-term and final exams.
This is not only true in the sciences and math, where exams are the main method by which competence is measured and judged, but even the curriculum of more composition-oriented disciplines like history, social studies, and literature.
For this reason, one of the most important skills a young student can learn is how to prepare for exams in a way that helps ensure a positive outcome without requiring an overwhelming investment of time.
Don’t Just Learn the Material, Learn the Test
It is a truism in the world of education that exam taking involves two separate competencies: not only do students need to understand the particular material about which they are being tested, they also need to understand how to excel in the test format itself.
While looking at exam preparation study tips can be incredibly helpful in terms of helping students study effectively, it is also important for students to be able to read a test with an eye to understanding what kind of answers it is looking for, and how they can provide them.
A student who has a deep knowledge of the course material can still do poorly on an exam if they are careless about time management, or if they do not understand the particular requirements of different portions of the exam itself. Test taking is itself a skill, and one that students should work to develop early on in their academic careers.
While we have offered must have study-tips on this blog in the past to help students use their study time more effectively, today we have prepared some new tips specifically designed to help students sharpen their test-taking skills. While there is no magic formula to test taking — and there is no substitute for the hard work of studying — there are a few things every student can due to improve their effectiveness as exam-takers.
1. Start the Exam by Reviewing Each Section
One of the biggest problems students run into when taking long exams is that they often give themselves insufficient time for each section. Two or three hours may seem like ample time to get through all the material, but at the high school level most exams are designed to take up the entire period, so budgeting your time carefully is essential if you don’t want to run out of time.
In most subjects (especially in the academic stream), tests will be divided into multiple choice, short answer, and long answer sections. In chemistry, physics, and biology, you may also need to identify the parts of a diagram or plot formulas on a graph. Calculating how long each of these sections will take and then divvying up time accordingly may take a few minutes at the top of the exam, but it will pay dividends later on by helping to ensure that every section is completed in a timely fashion.
2. Get Test Prep Help From a Tutor
While students are on their own when it comes time to actually take the exam, having some extra help in the weeks leading up to it can have a huge impact, especially if they have access to a tutor who can help them work through practice exams and provide them with helpful pointers on how to manage their time.
Engaging a tutor isn’t just useful if you have a child who is struggling in school; tutors can be great coaches for any student who wants a little more help sharpening their test taking skills so they can reach their full academic potential. For information about how you can find a tutor in your area, contact us to learn more about our tutoring philosophy and the different ways our tutors can help with test prep.
3. Do a Memory Dump
A memory dump can be a helpful way to start an exam with the knowledge you need in front of you. In a memory dump, you start the exam by writing out some of the key information you believe you will need to have at your fingertips.
Once you’ve reviewed the different sections of the exam and know how long you need for each, you can write down the formulas, terms, or even quotes that you plan on using in your answers. This will help stimulate your memory, and can organically lead into answering some of the harder questions while the knowledge is fresh.
4. Focus on the Curriculum
Exams exist to test students on what they’ve learned, so the best way to prepare for an exam is to think critically about what the main learning objectives of a unit or course have been. For example, if a language arts class spent a lot of time focussing on the classic five-part essay structure, there is a good chance that students will be expected to reproduce this information on the exam.
This means that a question asking students to write an essay comparing 1984 to Brave New World is really asking students to demonstrate their understanding of this five-part structure, rather than testing them on their in-depth literary knowledge of these novels.
Test taking is, for most students, a stressful experience, but according to some experts, levels of anxiety around test taking among students are rising. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given how much is riding on this one measure of academic ability.
Fortunately, as with things like math anxiety, there are ways to help students prepare themselves in advance so that they feel more in control of the situation, and better able to perform. It is important to remember that most students who attend class and do their homework will actually have a fairly good command of the information they are being given — the challenge is in demonstrating this knowledge in the high stress conditions of an exam.
By learning to allocate time strategically, do memory dumps, focus on the curriculum, and work through practice tests with a tutor, your child can develop the practical skills that will help them build their confidence and unlock their academic potential.
Helping Your Child Understand the Difference Between Median, Mean, and Range
In 2017, The Globe and Mail made waves by publishing a story reporting that half of all Grade 6 students in Ontario failed to meet provincial math standards as measured by the Education Quality and Accountability Office. These statistics showed a general decrease in math literacy across a range of different cohorts, and confirmed what many parents and educators already feared: that today’s children are falling behind when it comes to basic skills.
While it is hard to ascribe any single cause to such a notable dip in education outcomes, it is clear that the students of today are suffering from cuts to education and an increasingly sharp divide between schools that have adequate resources and those that don’t.
When you factor in the challenges many students already deal with when it comes to mastering the math curriculum (math anxiety is a problem that continues to affect a significant percentage of students), it is perhaps unsurprising that performance in math is starting to slip.
And while there are things you can do if you want to know how to overcome math anxiety or help your child engage with the math curriculum in more productive ways, improving your child’s math skills requires more than just exposure therapy: it requires intense one-on-one support that can help get your math questions answered so your child can learn to apply basic arithmetical concepts.
Tips for Teaching Median, Mean, and Range
One particular concept younger children are most likely to struggle with is the difference between median, mean, and range. One of the expectations set up by the Ontario math curriculum is that by the end of Grade 5, students will be able to calculate the mean, and understand how it relates to the median and range of a set of numbers. Not only is this a key part of the Grade 5 curriculum, it also features on the Grade 6 EQAO assessment of reading, writing, and mathematics.
Helping your child understand what these terms mean and how to apply them to problem solving is essential for their academic success, so if you they are having a hard time grasping these concepts, here are a few ways you can help them understand the difference between them.
Mean
For most of us, the concept of the mean, or “average,” is so familiar that it needs little explaining. But the concept of the mean isn’t nearly as intuitive for children, and helping them learn not just how to calculate the mean, but to understand the underlying principle, can take some work.
For example, if you have a set of six numbers (8, 12, 16, 14, 19, 7), you calculate the mean by adding these numbers up and then dividing by six. This will give you the average of the six values, 12.66. Children are often confused by the fact that this number is not part of the original set, which is why it is important, when teaching the mean, to stress that the average may be a seventh number that doesn’t appear in the original set of six.
Median
In some ways, the median is easier to understand, as it takes fewer steps to arrive at the median than to calculate the mean. The median is simply the middle value in a sorted list of numbers, so to find the median all you need to do is arrange the numbers in order from smallest to greatest, add up the total number of numbers, and count up to find the middle number.
The challenge when teaching median is often more about helping kids focus in school than it is about particular difficulties with understanding the topic. It is common for children to confuse mean with median simply because the sound similar, so remind you child that the mean is the “mean old average” while the median is the mid-point.
Range
Simply put, the range of a set of numbers is the difference between the highest number and the lowest, and can be found by putting the numbers in order and subtracting the smallest value from the greatest.
When teaching the range, it is often easiest to compare it to a “window.” The numbers in the range are what you can see out of the window, and the range is the size of the window.
The Role of Tutoring in Improving Competence in Arithmetic
Concepts like mean, median, and range are foundational tools for understanding mathematics, and if your child is going to be able to keep apace with their curriculum, they will need to be able to master them early on.
Unfortunately, the most effective way to lock these concepts into long-term memory is by repeated exposure. While math tends to be a skill that relies heavily on logical thinking, understanding the terminology of math is a matter of memorization, and tutors can play a helpful role in providing your child with extra help in fully understanding the ideas behind mean, median, and range.
Because tutoring allows children to encounter concepts on their own terms, without the fear of looking foolish for getting a question wrong, it can play an important role in helping children come to grips with difficult material. And if you learn about our educational philosophy you will know that we encourage our tutors to see themselves as smart friends coming alongside students to help them learn at their own pace and in their own way.
Math is one of those skills that your child is going to use every day of their life, and basic numeracy is as important as literacy in terms of helping your child land a good job. Students who excel at math have a head start in the job market, and according to one study undertaken by researches at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody School, mastery of arithmetical concepts early on is a major predictor of success later in life.
If you want to make sure your child is able to buck the trend of declining math scores, call Prep Academy Tutors today to make sure they have the support needed to master their curriculum.
Tutoring and the Study Cycle
How do we learn, and how can we use what we know about the brain to learn more effectively? For researchers in the psychology of learning, these questions are of paramount importance, and finding answers to them can help educators unlock their students’ potential and help them learn more efficiently.
One of the central insights this branch of psychology has yielded is that some study patterns and approaches are much more effective than others; simply working hard and spending a lot of time studying is often not enough to lock new information into the long-term memory. This is where the Study Cycle comes in.
A series of steps that have been shown to help students take in, process, and remember new information, the Study Cycle is often used by universities to help new students develop strong independent study habits; but it can also be an immensely helpful tool for children at the primary and secondary levels. Indeed, one of the benefits of hiring a private tutor is that tutors can help children build the good study habits that come with an understanding of the Study Cycle, equipping them to handle self-directed independent study on their own when they are no longer living at home.
The Study Cycle is most often portrayed as consisting of five discrete steps that, taken together, help students incorporate new knowledge into their understanding of the world. These steps can be carried out over the course of a single day, or over a longer period of time. But the key is to incorporate new information through active repetition and retrieval.
1. Preview
Before class begins, students should skim new material and take note of new concepts and major points that they will be encountering in the upcoming lesson. This will prime them for the new information they are about to be introduced to, and will help them understand the broad strokes of what they are about to learn.
It also helps them to formulate any questions they might have early on, and gives them an opportunity to test the limits of their own knowledge. Previewing material doesn’t need to take long, and can be done in the morning before class.
2. Attend
Attending classes is obviously a vital part of learning at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary levels. If a student is skipping classes, it is going to be hard for them to keep up with new material and truancy almost inevitably leads to decreased performance and falling grades.
But it isn’t enough for students to simply show up to class. While the 21st century has seen no shortage of new teaching methods for the digital classroom the fundamentals remain the same: students will retain information best when they are actively involved. Taking notes is an essential dimension of learning.
As pedagogy experts Francoise Boch and Annie Piolat argue in their summary of the research into note taking and learning, taking notes is actually a sophisticated activity that helps students process new information as they are introduced to it, learn to recognize the essential points, and also gives them valuable writing practice. Attendance isn’t just about showing up — it’s about participating in the learning process.
3. Review
Scientists who study memory have noted that in order to transfer a piece of information from short-term to long-term memory, repetition over time is important. After class is finished, it is a good idea to have students briefly review what they learned. Bringing it to mind again will help fill in gaps, and can help develop the pathways of retrieval that fosters real learning.
4. Study
Every step of the Study Cycle serves an important purpose, but none is as misunderstood as the fourth step: studying. It’s common for parents to require their children to do a certain amount of homework every night, and while it is good to built study time into the day, it is equally important to make sure that study time is being used wisely.
Experts agree that short periods of intense studying are much more valuable than long cram sessions, so trying to fit in thirty minutes to an hour every day is far more effective than spending several hours the night before a test.
If you child needs extra help, hiring a tutor can help you get the most out of these study periods, as a tutor can help students build confidence in their ability to understand the material. If you are interested in finding out how a tutor might help your child succeed, check this out to learn more about our teaching philosophy and practices.
5. Check
Learning isn’t just about memorizing new information: it is also about making it useful by incorporating it into your child or teen’s understanding of the world. The final step in the study cycle is checking to see whether the information has actually been incorporated, and learning by teaching is a great way to do this is. Having your child try to teach the material to someone else is a great way to test their own understanding.
If you find a tutor in your area who can work with your child on a one-to-one basis, they can help make this process a little more personal. Tutoring is most effective when the tutor plays the role of a peer, a smart friend who can come alongside the student and help them master the material, rather than another authority figure who is providing them with information.
The end goal of learning is to provide your child with information they can use in the real world, so providing them with a tutor who can help them practice checking new information is a great way to ensure that they understand the curriculum material.
Studying smart is just as important as studying hard, and the Study Cycle is scientifically proven to help students lock in new information as efficiently as possible. Tutors can play an important role in implementing the study cycle with your child, so if you are interested in learning more about our approach, get in touch with us today.
Gamification and Learning in the Classroom and at Home
One of the perennial challenges every educator faces is getting children engaged in learning. When kids are interested in a subject they learn quickly and voraciously, devouring books, educational films, and webpages related to their interests and sharing the information with anyone who will listen.
Compared to adults, children’s minds are like sponges, soaking up information at every turn; unlike adults, however, they are often undisciplined learners, and the role of the teacher is to channel this raw learning potential toward useful ends.
If you really want to help your kids excel in school however, you will also need to recognize the limitations every individual teacher faces. With class sizes in Ontario schools set to grow, and with teachers already overburdened with teaching and extra-curricular responsibilities, it can be hard to bring the latest insights from the psychology of learning to bear in the classroom.
For this reason, it is important for parents to ensure that their children are being engaged in learning not only at school, but at home as well. Hiring a tutor who understands new pedagogical tools and methods like gamification and can apply them to one-on-one instruction in the home is one way to keep your child excited about learning outside the regular school day.
Gamification: An Innovative Approach to Student Engagement
It has become increasingly common for schools that want to adopt cutting-edge educational techniques to incorporate tools that utilize aspects of gamification to help engage students in the classroom. When a child comes home talking about how they were learning French with the help of an app-based game, this is gamification in action.
But what is gamification in the classroom and how can it be used to enhance learning? The idea that games can help children learn is anything but new, of course (you can probably remember playing educational games during your own time at school), but one of the things that makes gamification a unique development is the tech aspect.
Computer games are more popular than ever before, and e-sports has now become one of the biggest segments of the entertainment industry. This means that an entire generation of digital natives has grown up with digital gaming as a central part of their experience. Computer games are popular in part because they are designed to stimulate the reward centres of the brain — levelling up and completing missions gives players a serotonin boost, and makes them feel they have accomplished something.
Gamification is the strategic use of this pleasurable quality of game playing to encourage particular kinds of learning, like memorizing new information or practicing new skills such as programming or problem solving. Because students are more likely to be interested in learning something like vocabulary memorization if it is presented as a game, gamification has huge implications for knowledge acquisition for learners of all ages.
Tutoring and Gamification
Gamification obviously has a significant potential to help students who would otherwise struggle to stay interested in their curriculum material, and can fulfill one of the central functions of learning by integrating new information into a child’s understanding of the world. But how can you use gamification to enhance your child’s learning at home?
This is where tutoring comes in. Gamification, properly applied, is about more than simply bringing learning and play together. In order for it to be effective, it needs to take place in the context where there are clear learning objectives. This means having an instructor who is able to integrate gamification into a larger lesson plan. For all the hype that currently exists around this new kind of learning, it is an education tool like any other, and its effectiveness is linked to how carefully it is implemented by knowledgeable teaching staff.
Having a tutor on hand who is familiar with your child’s school curriculum and understands the larger learning objectives is a one way of ensuring that your child is not only engaged in the learning process, but is also getting the kind of personalized feedback that is essential for learning success.
There has been a significant amount of academic research into the role that feedback plays in learning, and most experts agree that students learn best when they have a clear sense not only of what their areas of weakness are, but of how they can take concrete steps to improve. Gamification plays an important role in helping students actually learn and integrate new information (for example, learning vocabulary and verb forms in a new language).
But without a tutor who can help evaluate their progress and coach them on how they can overcome their current obstacles, learning can quickly become aimless and counter-productive. For this reason, our tutoring approach is built around matching your child with a tutor who can help them develop their particular areas of weakness, and integrate the information gamification tools are helping them learn into a the broader education framework of their curriculum.
If you want to understand how our tutoring services work and learn more about how our educational philosophy, you can explore the information available on our website, or get in touch with us today to book a consultation. And if you want to know about specialized services like SAT/ACT test prep, or want to know how to find a local tutor, you can click here for more information or give us a call today.
The explosive development of new technology over the past two decades has unlocked huge possibilities for enhancing learning experiences. From educational apps like Duolingo to new virtual reality simulators, teachers and parents alike now have access to a wide range of tech-based tools for engaging students in education.
But it is important to remember that technology will never fully replace the personalized feedback and one-on-one instruction that is such an important part of learning. New gamificatied approaches to education will only ever be as effective as the teachers and tutors implementing them.
5 Scientifically Proven Methods to Make Learning More Efficient and Fun
Keeping children invested and engaged in learning is a day-to-day struggle for most parents and one that can seem overwhelming. With so many distractions vying for a child’s time, instilling the values of discipline and the virtues of curiosity isn’t easy.
This is why it is important to use study strategies that have been scientifically proven to get results. If you want to find ways to make learning more efficient and fun for your kids, here are five methods that can help you — and your children — succeed.
1. Avoid Multitasking
More than ever before, we live in a mediated world. Even adults have a hard time going an hour without checking social media or looking at something on their phones, and issues like “smartphone addiction” are now being recognized as serious problems. This poses a particular threat to children, who are increasingly struggling to pay the kind of deep attention that is needed in order to learn complicated concepts.
The single most important thing you can do to improve your child’s study habits is to get rid of distractions. Sustained, intensive study for short periods of time is far more effective than longer study periods that are constantly being interrupted by Snapchat and text messages.
If you want to improve the quality of your child’s study time, you might also want to consider hiring a tutor who will keep them focussed on the task at hand (you can click here to get more info about how to find a tutor in the Greater Toronto Area).
2. Connect Learning to Everyday Life
One of the biggest challenges any educator faces is connecting the sometimes abstract and theoretical aspects of a school curriculum to a student’s life and interests. Literacy may be one of the most essential skills a child will ever learn, but in an age of emojis, instructional videos, and video games, it can be hard to convince students that being able to read at a high level of comprehension is important.
This is born out by the numbers: Canada is currently facing a decline in literacy and numeracy, and has fallen in international rankings when compared to countries like South Korea, Japan, and the Netherlands.
For this reason, it is essential to help make the connection between practical skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic and the things your child already enjoys. Try to find books, articles, and websites with content that will appeal to them, and engage them creatively through activities like writing a screenplay for their own Marvel movie. If you are interested in finding other ways to help your child develop a love of reading, you can click here for more practical strategies for literacy development.
3. Study Multiple Subjects a Day
There is a tendency among students to want to block their time and focus on one subject for a longer period. While this method can be effective when learning some things (when writing essays, for example, it is a good idea to spend as much time as possible in an uninterrupted state of flow), when it comes to memorizing facts or learning a new language, it can be much more effective to parcel the task out into manageable periods.
For example, if your child is studying Math, French, History, and Biology, they are going to need to do a lot of memorization. If they only have an hour of studying time a day, or five hours a week, it will be far more useful to use an interleaving technique and split the study time up into half hour parcels, studying Math and French one day and History and Biology the next. This means they will never go more than two days without working on each subject, and will be able to direct their study time more effectively.
Furthermore, because each individual study session is only taking on a small and manageable amount of new information, it is easier to get students motivated and to keep them from getting discouraged.
4. Learn Through Teaching
One of the reasons our education philosophy is so interactive is because we believe that most students learn best when they have someone to bounce ideas off of. A tutor should be like a smart friend who can help make studying less tedious and more engaging, not only because this will make studying more fun, but also because it has been proven to help learning outcomes.
Learning through teaching — a method by which the student tries to teach the information they have just learned to someone else — is proven to be extremely effective, and having a tutor on hand gives your child the opportunity to try out their knowledge on someone who also understands the material. The tutor can gently correct any mistakes or misunderstandings, while also providing the student with an attentive and friendly audience.
This will help your child build confidence in their own learning and communication abilities, and will help them develop secondary skills like giving presentations. Who knows — they may love the experience so much they will want to become a Prep Academy Tutor themself further down the road!
5. Take Notes
Note taking is one of the single best practices a student can incorporate into their study strategy. Not only does note taking serve a practical purpose by providing a record of the material that was covered in class, it also helps develop critical thinking and writing skills, because it forces students to focus on the most important points in the lesson.
Note taking also keeps students alert and engaged in class, so even if a teacher provides the slides and lecture notes for the class, students should still take notes of their own.
As most teachers will tell you, students are not actually opposed to learning, given the right conditions. In fact, when it comes to subjects they love, children quickly become experts. What is often lacking is a sense of purpose, motivation, and structure, which is what these five teaching methods and tips can, when applied by an experienced tutor, provide.
3 Literacy Challenges and How You Can Help Your Child Overcome Them
Few skills are as essential for a child’s development and success as literacy. Learning to read and write is one of the foundational building blocks of the modern education system, and students who fall behind in literacy are almost guaranteed to fall behind in most of their other subjects as well. After all, without reading and writing skills, how can children master subjects like history, geography, and social studies, which require strong reading comprehension and the ability to communicate one’s thoughts through writing?
While most parents would consider literacy to be one of the most essential aspects of a primary school education, however, evidence shows that in Canada, literacy is declining.
In 2017, the OECD international surveys of adult skills reported that despite having one of the largest working-age populations with tertiary education in the world, Canada’s literacy rate is dropping. This decline in practical reading and writing abilities among Canadians is a major concern, and speaks to a disconnection between levels of formal education and actual mastery of basic skills.
If you are worried about declining literacy rates and want to ensure that your child has the tools they need to become competent readers and writers, Prep Academy Tutors is here for you — we have extensive experience teaching a wide range of subjects, and will be happy to connect you with a tutor who can meet your child where they are and help them meet their learning objectives.
The good news is that, while learning to read and write is an area that many children struggle with, with these three tips for improving literacy skills and the help of a skilled tutor, it is one that is well within reach of everyone.
1. Ground Literacy in Everyday Tasks
Learning to read and write effectively involves developing a lot of distinct skills, and it is common for educators in the early stages to focus on discrete building blocks of literacy like phonics and the alphabet.
But this focus on formal aspects of language acquisition should be supplemented with exposure to the practical dimension of language-use. Literacy is about more than just knowledge: it is about a capacity to accomplish language-related tasks, and this requires an approach that roots reading and writing in everyday experiences.
One of the things you can do to help your child improve their literacy skills at home is by integrating practical reading and writing skills into the daily routine. For example, having younger children help with practical tasks like making shopping lists and reading recipe directions helps children engage with reading and writing in a way that is directly related to the world around them, and helps to instil a sense of the value of literacy.
2. Provide Personalized Help
As with any skill, on the path the literacy children are likely to meet regular plateaus. In situations like this, it can be important for them to have access to personalized, one-on-one help to overcome the obstacles they are facing. Unfortunately, this kind of individual attention is often not available in the classroom, which is why children may need extra help at home.
This can be difficult to do as a parent, and one reason you might want to find a tutor near you is because a tutor can provide the kind of targeted literacy support children who are struggling to get to the next level in their reading and writing.
3. Make Reading a Part of Life
Like all skills, literacy is something that can only be developed through practice. If a child is struggling with reading comprehension, the most effective way to help them improve is by encouraging them to read more. Unfortunately, according to the latest statistics from First Book Canada, an organization that works with educators and other partners to remove barriers to learning by creating equal access to education for children in need, a staggering twenty-five percent of Canadian households don’t have a single book.
This means that at least one in every four children are trying to develop reading and writing skills without having the basic tool needed to do so — books. And even parents who do read often struggle to pass the habit on to their children.
With so many entertainment options available, from Netflix shows to YouTube to video games to sports and other extracurricular activities, it can be hard to convince children that reading can be an equally rewarding activity, especially if they find reading difficult and uninteresting.
While there are no sure-fire ways to get kids to start reading more, here are a few things parents can do to help encourage children to make reading a regular activity:
Read to Your Child
One of the best ways to normalize reading when your children are young is by reading to them. This will not only help get them interested in stories, but it will also help establish reading as a worthwhile activity.
Follow their Interests
What a child is reading is less important than the fact that they are reading, so let your child follow their interests when picking reading materials. For example, if they are interested in sports, a biography of an athlete that is appropriate for their reading level may be a good way to get them engaged.
Go to the Library
If your child doesn’t seem interested in any of the reading materials you have recommended, taking them to a library and telling them to pick out five books is a creative way to delegate the exploration to them.
Get them Interested in a Series or Author
plenty of non-readers have been turned on to literature because they fell in love with Harry Potter or The Hunger Games. If your children like these films, use that as a springboard to get them interested in the books.
Ask their Teacher or Tutor for Tips
Teachers and tutors have a lot of experience helping children learn, so asking for their advice on what you can do to encourage literacy in the home is always a good idea.
Reading and writing are skills that most children will struggle with at one point or another. Indeed, many people will continue to develop as readers and writers throughout their lives, adding new words to their vocabularies and becoming more proficient written communicators.
The most important thing to instil young learners with is an appreciation for the importance of the written word, and the habit of reading for information and pleasure. It might not be possible to turn your child into a voracious reader overnight, but by grounding literacy in everyday tasks, providing personalized help, and encouraging a love of reading to take root, you can prepare your child for a life of continuous learning.
Worried About Increasing Class Sizes? Hire a Private Tutor
Most parents want their children to succeed in life, and in the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century, doing well in school is a pre-requisite for any good job. But not all students are naturally inclined towards academics, and with class sizes across Ontario set to increase in the coming years, it is likely that some struggling students will fall behind. What can ordinary Ontarians do to make sure these changes don’t impact their children’s learning?
In order to understand how problems can be averted, it is important to understand why growing class sizes are an issue in the first place. According to Shirley Bell of the Elementary Teacher’s Federation of Ontario, increasing class sizes beyond twenty-six students is correlated with negative impacts on students, because it means students have less access to the vital one-on-one support they need if they are to thrive.
Teachers don’t just present information: they play a vital role in modelling for students how problem solving works. So how is a child supposed to learn mathematics, writing, or science if they don’t have a teacher close at hand who can correct their errors and help them master the skills they need to succeed?
The importance of individual instruction for positive educational outcomes is backed up by hard research: a recent report from the Center for Public Education noted that smaller class sizes are especially important in the lower grades (and are critical from Kindergarten to Grade 3), and argued that no class should have a student-teacher ratio higher than eighteen to one.
Given that the Ontario government’s education plan raises the average classroom size to twenty-eight students, parents can clearly expect their children’s quality of education to suffer from the lack of personal attention. This is why you should get your child a private tutor to help them prepare for the coming academic year.
The Benefits of Tutoring
There is a common misconception that tutoring is only for students who are struggling academically, or who have particular learning challenges that require remedial help. While it is certainly true that tutoring has been shown to play an important role in increasing matriculation rates, most students can benefit from tutoring of one kind or another.
This will become even truer as classroom ratios grow and students get less one-on-one time with their teachers, making it less likely they will get the kind of instant feedback that facilitates effective learning.
Simply being told how to write an essay isn’t much help if students aren’t able to receive the kind of personalized critique that helps them work through the process for themselves. Making mistakes is a key part of learning, and one-on-one help from a tutor can make it a lot easier for students to learn from these mistakes more efficiently (you can get more information here about how the Prep Academy Tutors’ approach helps students become more confident in their abilities).
This is especially true of a subject like math, which demands a lot in terms of abstract thinking. One of the benefits of getting a math tutor is that it helps students overcome their fears of difficult problems and make the link between the formulas they are learning in the classroom and the world around them. This is a vital aspect of learning, and one that is particularly difficult for teachers to manage when they are stretched for time and resources by large class sizes.
Our Approach
Tutoring can clearly play an important role in helping students handle the stresses of larger class sizes and a less interactive time with their teachers. But if you want to make sure that your child gets the most out of their private tutor, you will need to find a tutoring service that provides personalized service.
At Prep Academy Tutors, we are proud to offer tutoring to a broad range of students with a broad range of needs. Here are a few of the unique services we offer to families across the Greater Toronto Area.
- Tutoring for All Ages and Subjects: We work with children starting in JK all the way up to Grade 12, and have tutors qualified to provide help in all subjects.
- Flexible Scheduling: We know that students these days are busy with lots of rewarding extra-curricular activities, which is why we work around your schedule to provide your children with the help they need.
- Home Tutoring: It is important to engage students in an environment they feel comfortable in, and where they can focus on their work. To make tutoring easier for you and less stressful for your child, we offer in-home service.
- Personal Attention: At Prep Academy Tutors, we observe the highest standards of professionalism — but we also understand that for tutoring to be effective, it needs to be personal. Our tutors meet your child where they are, and come alongside them as an equal in tackling their personal academic challenges.
- Test Preparation Help: If you have a child who is considering studying abroad after high school, they will probably need to take either the SAT or the ACT. These challenging standardized tests are the gateway to an exciting academic career, but they can also be highly competitive. With tutoring from Prep Academy Tutors, you can ensure your child is up to the challenge.
If you want to know more about how Prep Academy Tutors can help your child achieve academic excellence, you can learn more about our teaching philosophy here. Or you can read our testimonials page to hear from parents whose children have benefitted from one-on-one sessions with Prep Academy Tutors.
Though it is not yet clear when the increase in Ontario’s class sizes will take effect, many parents are already worried about what it will mean for their children’s schooling. Don’t take any chances with your child’s future: If you want to ensure that your child’s education prepares them for lifelong learning, get in touch with us today to find out how our tutors can help your child get the personalized instruction they deserve.
How Much of a Difference Does Tutoring Really Make?
For students who are struggling in school, tutoring is often touted as a great way to help them focus on their academic work and provide the one-on-one help they need to master difficult curriculum material. But how much of a difference does a tutor actually make? This is a valid question, and one that any responsible parent should ask before engaging the services of a tutor.
To answer it, however, it is important to understand that not all tutoring services are equal. A tutor who doesn’t have the right training and experience cannot be expected to transform your child’s academic performance; at best, they offer no value added, and at worst they can encourage study habits that are actually damaging.
When looking for a tutor, it is important to go with a tutoring service that works with experts, professors, and teachers who have a thorough knowledge of their particular subject. It is also important to ensure that when you hire a private tutor you are getting an individual who understands the particular needs of your student, and can use modern pedagogical methods to ensure good education outcomes.
At Prep Academy Tutors, we hire knowledgeable, experienced tutors who can teach students from JK to Grade 12. We work with your child’s specific class curriculum to ensure the best outcomes, and we hold ourselves to the highest standards of educational excellence so that your child can achieve their full potential. To this end, when we first start working with a new family we ensure at the onset that the teacher or tutor we suggest has the experience and skillset necessary to help your child succeed.
The 3 Ways Tutoring Can Make a Difference
Numerous studies have shown that the individual one-on-one attention that comes with tutoring really does make a difference. Students who are given an opportunity to go over difficult material at their own pace with a knowledgeable, certified teacher are far more likely to see real growth and learning.
And this is how Prep Academy Tours works — our tutors use methods that are scientifically proven to be effective, and focus on the particular needs of each individual child. Here are three reasons why engaging tutoring from Prep Academy Tutors gets concrete results:
1. Tutoring Provides Students With a Safe Space
A teacher who is responsible for a classroom needs to project authority. But a tutor who is working one-on-one with a struggling student should be more like a peer, a smart friend who can come alongside them and help them deal with math anxiety or make sense of their French homework.
One of the most important ways tutoring makes a difference is by helping students encounter challenging ideas and concepts in a safe, supportive context where they can make mistakes and explore without worrying that they will look foolish in front of their peers.
2. Tutoring Lets Students Focus on Their Own Areas of Weakness
Not all students struggle with the same material, and this makes classroom teaching a delicate balancing act where teachers try to provide as much help to as many people as possible. A student struggling with one part of the curriculum may not get the time they need in class to focus on it, and may not have enough of a grasp of the underlying concepts to study it effectively in their own time. Tutors can help students overcome their personal hurdles and focus on the topics and problems they actually need help with.
3. Tutoring Helps Students Develop Good Study Habits
Most of us are familiar with the old adage that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime. This is true of studying as well: learning how to learn is one of the most important things an education should impart. Because tutors work more intensively with students, they can help them cultivate good study habits and develop strategies they will be able to use for years to come.
If you want your child to benefit from the enhanced, personalized help that comes with tutoring from a certified teacher, get in touch with Prep Academy Tutors today!
Tutoring Doesn’t Just Help the Student
While there is ample evidence proving that tutoring can play a transformative role in the life of a student, tutors also benefit from the intensive one-on-one experience of helping someone else work through a curriculum and strengthen their own learning skills.
If you are interested in becoming a tutor yourself, find out how you can join our team and unlock your own potential as an educator. Tutoring is an immensely rewarding career for teachers who want to help students in a more one-on-one context, and as the University of Hawai‘i Community College has shown, working as a tutor has been shown to help provide an even deeper grounding in one’s knowledge of a subject, provides skills acquisition and enforcement, and can play a significant role in career development.
If you care about teaching and want to be part of a team that is passionate about helping individual students reach their full potential, get in touch with Prep Academy Tutors today!
It is a widely acknowledged truth that every student has their own learning style and learns at their own pace. While some students may function better in a classroom environment than others, all students can benefit from the one-on-one attention and personalized approach that comes with tutoring.
Tutoring has been proven to make a huge difference for students of all walks of life, so if you are interested in hiring a tutor, or you think you may want to become a tutor yourself, call Prep Academy Tutors to learn more about how tutoring can make a difference for you.
4 Ways Tutoring Can Help Your Child Get Into the Right University
Who doesn’t want their child to get into a good university or college? Getting into a top school can transform a student’s life, providing them with incredible resources and much better chances of success in their chosen career path.
But as any parent who has participated in the process themselves knows, admissions to top-tier universities is competitive. With tens of thousands of candidates and only a few spaces to fill, your child needs to be among the best of the best if they want to make the grade (Harvard’s admission rate, for example, is 6.5%). This means your child needs to be in the top ten percent if they even want to be considered, and will have to be better than 93.5% of their peers if they are to receive admittance.
Given how stiff the competition is, the students who get into elite universities often do so because they have started preparing for their application years in advance. Grades need to be consistently strong, extra-curricular activities need to be chosen strategically, and students need to be able to show that they can perform at the highest levels academically.
For this reason, it can be useful the hire Prep Academy Tutors to provide your child with bespoke tutoring options that can help them prepare for the rigours of university admissions. We meet students where they are, and our tutors work alongside them to help them meet their learning goals. If you want to know more about how hiring a tutor can give your child an edge, here are four ways tutoring can help your child ace their university admissions.
1. Tutoring is Both Rigorous and Personal
Tutoring isn’t just about passing on information; it is about engaging students intellectually to help them internalize what they are learning so they can build on this knowledge over the course of their academic life. The best tutors don’t just know the material well, they also know how to help a student master it on their own terms.
Expert teachers are at the heart of how our tutoring services work because we understand that effective tutoring requires the same kind of methodical, strategic approach that teachers use in the classroom. At the same time, a tutor isn’t just teaching to a class of one: tutors take advantage of the more informal, personal dynamic a one-on-one lesson allows to help students build confidence and develop their own problem-solving skills.
2. Tutoring can be Tailored to Each Student’s Needs
Every student is different, and every student has slightly different needs. One of the reasons children struggle in school is because the size and format of the typical public school classroom privileges a certain learning style. While Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences has achieved widespread support among educators, budgetary and logistical restrictions still conspire to give students with linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence an edge.
Because tutors can use a one-on-one approach, they are able to help your child learn the material and prepare for standardized tests in a way that plays to their strengths. If you want to know more about our tutoring philosophy, check this out to learn about how our tutors turn pedagogical insights into tools like gamification to maximize educational outcomes.
3. In-Home Tutoring Provides Flexible Options
Universities are increasingly looking for students who aren’t just book-smart, but who also have a commitment to service and an interest in extra-curricular activities. This means that students angling to get into a good college or university should also be taking their involvement in organized sports, arts programmes, science fairs, and community volunteering seriously.
This puts a lot of students in a catch-22 situation: they need strong grades to even be considered for top schools, but they also need to prove that they have a well-rounded personality. When are they going to find time for all of this?
Private tutoring is a flexible alternative to the after-school tutoring offered by many high schools. When students are juggling dozens of commitments a week, tutoring needs to be adapted to the student’s individual schedule, even if that schedule changes week by week. Scheduling tutoring sessions for when your child is free ensures they can work on their grades while also working to strengthen other parts of their university application.
4. Don’t Just Learn the Material, Learn the Test
If your child is applying to study outside Canada, they will need to take one of the standard American admissions tests: the SAT or the ACT. Both of these tests are extremely demanding, and will play a major role in determining whether or not a student will be admitted to the university of their choice.
Both are designed to test a student’s general academic knowledge, but it is a well-known fact that studying strategies for taking the test is an important part of doing well on it. If you are considering any international schools it is important to find your local tutor early so they have adequate time to help your child prepare for the gruelling process of taking one of these standardized entrance exams.
When it comes to preparing your child for the rigours of university, there simply aren’t any shortcuts. If you want them to get into a top tier institution, you need to start preparing them for the hard work ahead now.
Because tutors meet students at their own level, tailor their approach to the student’s needs, and have the expertise to help not only with particular subjects, but with standardized tests themselves, they can play a vital role in helping your child achieve admission to the school of their choice.