A World of Learning

 In addition to being a tutor, I'm also a substitute paraeducator for elementary schools, and I've done it eight times now! I really enjoy it! The only thing that's difficult is navigating my way around the myriad of hallways. I've been a recess overseer, a lunch room overseer, and watched the kids while they were in line waiting for the buses to arrive. But the best part is when I get to work in the classrooms! For one teacher, I got the cardboard dividers off the shelf and set one on each desk, then made sure each desk had a sheet of notebook paper and a sheet of graphing paper and a pencil. This was all before the kids arrived. I've also done timed reading with different classes, one method being to see how many words a kindergartener can read in one minute, marking the words they read wrong, and another method where the kids in 1st grade had to read a one-page story and time them to see how long it took them, marking any words they mispronounced. I've done m...

 One of the boys that I tutor is on a little league baseball team, and I was able to go to one of his games! I enjoy support the kids that I tutor in this way, and it shows that I care about more than just what I can teach them, but I care about them personally as well.  At the baseball game, I took a photo of the team lined up before the game started, and I can mostly see their jersey numbers. Bryson is #34. Then I thought, how can I use this in a math problem? I decided to see what numbers he can figure out to multiply to get 34. Then I thought I could do that with the other teammates' numbers as well. I'll have to do more than just what I got in the picture, but that's a start! Oh, and they only lost the game by one point. So close!

 I have two students who are learning to identify the letters of the alphabet by sight. Elliot is really good at knowing what letters to use, and what they are called. I'm working with him now on writing "My name is Elliot."  I also have Ruby, who is only three years old, but knows the ABC song. She just can't say the letters of the alphabet in order. So we play "Alphabet Bean Bag Toss" where I say a letter and toss her the bean bag, then if she doesn't know the next letter, I tell her what to say as she tosses the bean bag back to me.  Her name is only four letters long, so I have her practice using plastic letters looking at her name spelled out. I have her say the letters along with me several times, then I mix up the letters to see if she can put them in the correct order. She can't really do that yet, but for some reason the letter B is easy for her to identify. We're still working on it, but she's so young that when she does get the han...

 Math is a more difficult subject to make interesting than reading, at least for most of my students. So I go online to find ideas for math pages that will at least prevent the math from being boring. Today, I did multiplication problems with a third grader that showed a picture for each problem. The image was a gumball machine and two large gumballs, all but one of which had a number in it. For example, the gumball machine might have a 12 in it, while one gumball would have a 3 in it. The student would need to determine what the missing number was to make the correct equation. Sometimes the machine would be empty, and there would be a number in each gumball, and toward the end of the worksheet, there was a number in the gumball machine but no numbers in the gumballs. They had to find out what two numbers, multiplied together, would equal the answer. It was a little bit tricky for him at first, but as there were three such problems, he caught on quickly and was able to do the last ...