Why Academic Success is a Team Effort for Toronto Parents
When most people think about education, they think about schools. But the reality is that while primary, secondary, and tertiary schools are where the bulk of formal education happens, children learn just as much if not more outside the classroom — from their parents, their peers, recreational activities like sports and music, and even the books they read in their leisure time.
This extracurricular learning feeds into mainstream academic success, which means that if you want your child to succeed in school, you need to conceive of their education as a team effort that involves not only you and your child’s teacher, but also their coaches, other instructors, and tutors.
Understanding education as a team exercise is particularly important for Toronto parents concerned about how deep education cuts are going to effect their children’s opportunities in life.
One of the reasons parents get in touch with us at Prep Academy Tutors is simply to find out what kind of options exist to expand their child’s academic horizons and make it easier for them to chart a way forward at a time when public education is facing significant cuts across Ontario. All parents want their children to do well, but the unfortunate truth is that many schools lack the funds and resources to ensure that all children get the support they need for academic success.
The good news is that there are many ways that tutoring services in Toronto can serve to provide exactly the kind of extra help parents and primary and secondary educators in Toronto need in order to provide children with the best chance of success.
If you want to know how tutoring can play a role in the team effort that is your child’s education, here are three things to keep in mind.
Tutoring Builds on Your Child’s Current Curriculum
There is a common misconception that tutoring largely exists to respond to individual problems (overcoming math anxiety, for example). And while tutors can be highly effective at strategic interventions related to specific performance concerns, many families hire tutors to work alongside their children through their regular curriculum, checking in every week to provide the extra support kids often need to process the material they are learning day-to-day.
Tutoring that is specifically meant to complement your child’s curriculum is particularly useful in times when large class sizes make it difficult for them to get the kind of one-on-one attention most children need to master difficult concepts from their teacher.
Because many of the tutors we hire have extensive teaching experience themselves, they are uniquely positioned to help your children work through the provincial curriculum for whatever subject they are struggling in. If you need an accounting tutor in Toronto for example, we can connect you with a qualified teacher who, in addition to being accredited to teach math and physics, has also taught accounting within the private education system in Ontario and knows its requirements well.
Tutors Improve Overall Confidence
One of the central goals of any education program, formal or informal, should be to help people of all ages develop the confidence and skills needed to engage with the world and solve problems on their own.
There is a growing body of academic research linking self-confidence to performance and achievement, and one of the most important things that primary education in particular should impart is confidence in one’s basic abilities to overcome learning difficulties with sufficient work and effort.
This is an area of education that Ontario’s schools — and schools in some parts of Toronto in particular — are not always well positioned to deliver, due to constraints on resources and the time teachers can spend with each student. While extra-curricular activities play an essential role in building confidence for children of all ages, it is still important for parents and tutors to help channel that confidence into academic performance as well.
One of the ways you can ensure that your child builds the kind of confidence they will need in order to succeed in university and later the workplace (where they will have to function more independently) is by providing tutoring help specifically geared toward helping children learn the skills and tools they need for independent learning.
Tutoring Gives Your Child Room to Take Risks
It is a truth universally acknowledged that in order to learn, you must make mistakes. But making mistakes in front of a classroom of other kids can be incredibly embarrassing, and shy or sensitive children may opt to stay quiet rather than risk getting a question wrong.
While it is an understandable impulse, over the long term this can have deeply negative consequences. Learning that taking a chance is sometimes rewarded — and learning how to deal with failure when it isn’t — is a necessary parts of any modern education, and if kids are reluctant to take these chances in class, parents need to find other, safer, ways for them to take risks.
If you want to learn how tutors can play a role in providing your child with a safe learning environment where they can explore ideas and concepts without worrying about looking foolish in front of their peers, contact us today to learn more about our teaching philosophy. Our tutors can offer instruction in your home, which means that your children can face the challenges of learning in a familiar and supportive environment.
The tutors we work with understand that the role they are playing is not merely academic, but also about building up confidence and skills in the kids they are working with. Perhaps more importantly, they understand that they are part of an educational team that includes you, the teacher, and a whole number of other people who are all working together.
For parents who want to make sure that their children will still get the best education possible, regardless of what future cuts may be coming to Toronto’s public education system, adding a tutor to your child’s education team is essential.
4 Strategies to Prevent Summer Learning Loss
For many parents, summer learning loss is a frustrating thing to witness. After watching their child struggle to master vital skills like writing and algebra over the course of the school year, summer comes along and seems to wipe the memory clean.
Numerous studies on summer learning loss have been conducted, and scientists have consistently observed not only that students tend to dip in performance after the summer break, but that these dips may become even more dramatic as the students enter middle school.
This should be of concern for every parent. Even bright students are affected by this decline in comprehension, which not only makes it difficult for them to get back into the rhythm of the school year, but can also cause them to experience a loss of confidence.
Fortunately, there are plenty of things parents can do to counteract this process. From inspiring them to pursue an educational hobby and getting them involved in community literacy programs to hiring professional tutors for your kids this summer, there are strategies available that can help you minimize or even overcome the adverse effects of the dreaded summer slide altogether. Here are four of the most effective.
1. Help Them Cultivate a New Passion
One of the most wonderful things about having young children is getting to watch them explore the world around them. Summer is a perfect time for this kind of exploration, and if you want to help curb their learning loss in general, encouraging them to get involved in an educational hobby like playing a musical instrument or participating in a science club is a great way to make learning fun.
These hobbies can also bear a different kind of fruit in the long term: as we have noted before in this space, when it comes to tips to help your kids get into university lots of schools are looking for students who have demonstrated a wide range of different interests. What starts as a summer passion may develop into the kind of dedicated hobby that can help make them stand apart from the crowd when it comes time to apply for post-secondary education.
2. Get Them Involved in a Reading Program
Decline in comprehension and skill in disciplines like history, social sciences, and language arts are almost always a by-product of a decline in reading. According to one seminal study, young children can lose as much as two months of reading skills over the course of the summer, in most cases because they are simply not reading.
This means that by grade five, a child will have lost a year and a half of their cumulative progress due to learning loss over the summer. Obviously, this represents a huge waste of time and resources; but what can parents do to stop it from happening?
The single most important thing is just to get them reading. Whether they are reading adventure books or romance novels matters less than the fact that they are reading at all, as summer reading of any kind has been correlated with better academic performance year round.
For this reason, getting them involved in a summer reading program that will allow them to discover new books and encounter reading in a fun and recreational context is a worthwhile investment of time and energy.
3. Hire a Summer Tutor
Sitting inside and going over math problems is probably the last thing your child wants to spend their summer doing, but with certain crucial skills, the only way to maintain educational inertia is through regular exposure. This can pose a major challenge, especially for students at the high school level who may be studying mathematical or scientific concepts that you can’t help them with.
In cases like these, hiring a summer tutor can be a very worthwhile investment. Not only can a tutor help keep your child engaged in their course material, because tutoring is significantly less formal than classroom learning, it is also an opportunity to help your child overcome personal learning challenges in a safe environment.
This is especially effective when it comes to hard skills like math, which can pose significant barriers for many students. Having a tutor come to your home every week will provide enough structure and support that your child will not only retain what they have learned throughout the school year, but can also improve their knowledge in advance of the year to come.
If you want to explore the possibility of tutoring this summer, call us to learn more about how Prep Academy Tutors can help your child meet their learning goals.
4. Turn Your Holiday Into a Field Trip
Finally, be aware of the educational opportunities that summer organically affords. Whether you like spending your summer holidays at the cottage or you’re planning a major family trip abroad, building educational opportunities into your holiday is a great way to keep children intellectually engaged during the summer months.
For example, if you’re travelling to visit family in another city or another part of the country, you can use it as an opportunity to get them reading about the geography or history of the place you are visiting. If you are going to a large city or a region with a rich cultural history, you may also be able to find young adult novels or picture books that are set in the places you will be travelling to.
Not only does this help keep your children engaged in educational work, it also helps to build a link between what they are learning in school and the world around them. Alternatively, you can plan your holiday around an educational theme, or make sure your itinerary includes day-trips to sites of historical or scientific interest.
Summer learning loss will always pose a threat for children in the elementary and middle school years, but you don’t need to accept it as inevitable.
By encouraging your children to stay engaged in learning throughout the summer by exploring new hobbies, reading regularly, getting tutoring, and making family holidays an educational opportunity, you can ensure they will be ready for the challenges of a new school year when September rolls around.
What Is Shared Reading?
Literacy is a critical skill, one that all children need to master in order to advance in their education. So it is perhaps unsurprising that so much of the emphasis in primary education is on helping students acquire the tools they need in order to engage in life long literacy development.
One of the most common strategies for helping students successfully acquire reading and skills is the method known as “shared reading,” in which a teacher or tutor presents a text to students via a big book or a SMART Board and reads the text aloud while the students follow along. If you remember this method of instruction from your own primary school years, it is probably because this is one of the most tried and true ways for helping children build connections between spoken and written language.
In this article, we will outline some of the reasons why shared reading is a useful method for teaching literacy, and also discuss particular strategies that can make shared reading even more effective.
Shared Reading Provides an Integrated Approach to Literacy
Learning to read is a unique challenge. For most children, connecting spoken language to written language is not an intuitive thing, and strategies for literacy education need to help students connect the language they speak with a system of signs and symbols that they can learn to use.
One of the reasons why shared reading is so effective is because it integrates direct instruction with practical application. As the teacher leads students through the text, they are able to use a number of different contextual markers (pictures, narrative, the formatting of the page itself) to make sense of how the story they are being told connects to the written language.
Shared reading is also valuable as a way of introducing students to more complex material that is beyond their normal reading level. Students who struggle to read at all can, with the help of their teacher, work through storybooks and other age-appropriate texts that will push the boundaries of their understanding and help boost their confidence.
By using shared reading in a classroom setting, teachers can:
- Help students gain an understanding of phonics and phonemic principles.
- Introduce them to new words
- Demonstrate strategies for comprehension and decoding, such as guessing meaning from context
- Reinforce print concepts (like reading from left to right, and the continuity of text from page to page)
- Help normalize reading activities, and foster an enjoyment and appreciation of written texts
Shared reading is an ideal classroom activity, because it provides teachers with the opportunity to engage the entire class in an exercise that has a clear entertainment component. But shared reading can also be a very helpful practice for a student to engage in on a one-on-one basis at home, either by yourself or with the help of a tutor.
In fact, shared reading is an excellent tutoring tool because it helps model skill acquisition in a safe and non-threatening way. In terms of our education philosophy, what makes us different is that we believe a tutor shouldn’t simply be a private teacher. We believe instead that a tutor should be like a very smart friend who comes alongside your child to help them feel their way through the material at their own pace.
Two Strategies that Can Make Shared Reading Even More Effective
While shared reading, as a practice, has been around for a long time, pedagogy experts have invested a lot of time researching ways to make this educational technique as effective as possible, and to integrate it with other strategies for literacy acquisition (you can click here to learn more about the latest literacy research).
They have found that shared reading can be made even more effective when the following strategies are applied:
Spend Time Introducing the Text
Shared reading is all about taking a text that is beyond a child’s reading level and making it approachable. For this reason, teachers generally see better results when they take the time to introduce the text properly and engage children’s curiosity before the reading begins.
For example, before opening the book, ask students what they think the book will be about based on the cover, and ask them what they already know about the subject. This will prime students to engage intellectual with the content of the story, and helps make challenging new material more approachable.
Engage Students in the Reading Itself
Once the reading has begun, don’t simply continue through to the end. Pause periodically to ask students about what is happening in the story, and encourage them to make predications about what is going to happen next. When you encounter words the child doesn’t know, ask them to guess what they mean, or to sound them out.
This gives children an opportunity to actively participate in the process, and to apply their own reading skills to deciphering the text (click here to read more about literacy development and other practical reading strategies). Reading is a skill we never really stop developing, so helping children engage their problem-solving faculties in the context of shared reading will provide them with a durable foundation for future learning.
Learning how to read is one of the biggest challenges your child will be faced with in their first years of schooling, and if you want to help them develop the habits of a life long learning, meeting this challenge using scientifically proven methods like shared reading is essential.
If you want to know more about how you can use shared reading in the home to help your child acquire literacy skills, get in touch with Prep Academy Tutors today to find out how we can provide extra help today.
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.
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.