Guest Blog Post: Getting from Decoding to Blending--All Skills Connect

Getting from Decoding to Blending--All Skills Connect

By Alexandra Berube, bostontutoringservices.com

Decoding and blending are interrelated skills, and some understanding of decoding is necessary before blending can occur. Decoding is breaking down a word into manageable parts (phonemes) so you can sound out the word (c-a-t is the decoded, three-phoneme version of the word cat). A student does not necessarily have to have mastered every letter-sound relationship in order to begin decoding, because some of that skill can be learned along the way with decoding, overlapping and contributing to greater growth in both skills. Children will begin decoding by sounding out the first letter, the initial sound. The medial vowel is often the hardest, because vowels have so many variations in their sounds. The best words to begin decoding with are C-V-C words--consonant-vowel-consonant--that have the most common form of the vowel sound, usually the short vowel sound. So words such as 'sat,' 'cat,' 'bed,' 'dog,' etc. are great to begin with, because each letter has a clear sound or phenome.

It's usually best to start with word families, such as the -at family, and group together a bunch of words with this word ending. This will act as a shortcut, because they will learn that -at is a chunked sound, that they can recognize two letters at a time, rather than letter by letter. This is the basis behind blending.

Many kids get stuck here at decoding, and are sounding words out but not putting them together (this is blending). They need to take 'c-a-t' to 'cat' to make meaning of the word, either by isolating each phenome or by isolating the initial sound and then connecting it to the -at word family. Reading word family mini books, such as in the link provided below, and practice with saying individual letter sounds such as in the games described earlier, will all contribute to growth and the ability to decode and blend.

These skills can all be instructed together, because I am a strong believer that we do not need to instruct on a step-by-step basis, making sure the child completely masters one individual skill before moving onto the next. Many children are still mastering their letter-sound relationships as they continue to decode and blend, and this is okay.

You have to begin working with them on real books, even simple mini books, early in the process, because they have to understand that they are reading for a purpose. They are reading to make meaning of text in front of them. If they learn the letter sounds in isolation from reading text, it serves no purpose after a certain point. The excitement that the child feels from finally being able to make meaning of words in front of them propels them forward and generates greater understanding of all previous skills.

About Alexandra Berube
Alexandra is the Managing Director of Boston Tutoring Services, a tutoring company that offers one-to-one in-home tutoring in Massachusetts. She is also a former Kindergarten teacher who also tutors students in grades K-8, in all subject areas, including test preparation.

Guest Blog Post: Trying Auditory Learning When Nothing Else Works...

Trying Auditory Learning When Nothing Else Works--Finding the Learning Method That Works Best for Your Student

By Alexandra Berube, bostontutoringservices.com

I recently met with a preschool teacher who was struggling with a student who was not learning his letters. He wasn't retaining them visually, no matter how many times she had him trace the letters with sandpaper, shaving cream, etc. These Montessori-style instruction methods involve tactile response, which is a great method of literacy instruction. However, in this case it wasn't taking hold.

She mentioned to me that when she does storytelling, she has him repeat back what happened in the story to the best of his ability, and that he had gotten better and better at recalling facts from stories that had been told to him out loud. I suggested he might be an auditory learner based on this information. I suggested that she play a tossing game. She would toss an object to him and say out loud the name of the object. When he caught the object, she would prompt him to name the object as well, focusing on the initial sound. For as many turns as necessary, she could say the word along with him, emphasizing the initial sound until he was able to isolate the initial sound on his own. With each object, he would gain more familiarity with the purpose of reading, which is: everything in the world has a name, and that name can be written with words, and a word is made up of letters, and there is always a first letter in a word.

Sometimes that's the hardest part of getting started in literacy--students have to understand the purpose of what they are doing. They have to understand that they are learning the letter shapes for a purpose, because the shapes represent a letter, which represents the beginning of a word. Children are not going to learn the larger steps of decoding and blending until they understand the purpose of the written word, and its auditory counterpart.

When working with beginning readers, it's important to assess every clue of how they absorb, retain, and output information, because those clues will tell you how they learn and what's the best route to take. Using as many different forms of instruction as possible (auditory, visual, tactile, kinetic) is valuable up until a point, but you may be confusing the child if they don't understand the purpose of what they are doing, and literacy becomes too intangible for them to grasp. Isolating the method of instruction that works best for them and then focusing as much as possible on that method, while emphasizing the purpose of literacy and its meaning in the real world, can yield the best results.

About Alexandra Berube
Alexandra is the Managing Director of Boston Tutoring Services, a tutoring company that offers one-to-one in-home tutoring in Massachusetts. She is also a former Kindergarten teacher who also tutors students in grades K-8, in all subject areas, including test preparation.

Guest Blog Post: What to Do with a Student Who is Not Learning His Letters

What to Do With a Student Who is Not Learning His Letters
By Alexandra Berube, bostontutoringservices.com

When I was teaching kindergarten, I had one student who was far behind the others. In kindergarten, there is always a wide spectrum of skills, but he did not know almost any of his letters or his letter-sound relationships, and this is a skill that students are expected to have before entering kindergarten--maybe not completely mastered, but close to it. During the fall of kindergarten, I did everything I could to aid him in gaining familiarity with the visual appearance of letters, as well as the letter sounds. Here are two games that I used so that by January he had finally mastered these skills.

1. Twister

I took a twister board, and used masking tape to make large letters on the colored circles. I used four different letters and repeated them across the board, each letter being a distinct sound: P, A, T, and N. On the spinner, I wrote these letters as well. When you spin the spinner, I changed it to, "put your left foot on the letter that makes the sound 't,'" emphasizing the sound and the tongue placement in the mouth. I did this with a group of students, so the student who was struggling never felt left out, and whenever he didn't know the letter sound, the other students happily showed him. He didn't mind being a student who wasn't sure of the letter sound in this game, because they were all physically moving around, rather than a bunch of students all looking at a whiteboard and one student being singled out as the one who doesn't know the answer.

2. Foam Letters

I have foam letters, about 2 inches in size, that I use for a number of activities. The letters are a great way to physically interpret the shape of letters, in order to gain more familiarity with the letter shapes and the sounds that they make. I had a file folder game, in which there was a trail that each game piece had to move down. On each square along the trail, there was a sticker that corresponded to an initial sound, so there was a sticker with a bee ('b'), dog ('d'), cat ('c'), etc. You would pull a foam letter out of a bag, and move your space to the corresponding sticker that started with that initial sound. So if you pulled a B out of the bag, you would move your game piece onto the sticker of the bee. In playing a group game like this, every student can get involved in sounding out the initial letter sounds, physically touching the letters, and seeing objects that begin with that letter. Any student who is struggling with these skills will see the other students modeling it, and get help from them on any letters they are still struggling with. All of the students want to help each other, so there is no sense (for the struggling child) of feeling like the student who can't get anything right.

After playing many games like these, and through regular private instruction, the student was able to make great strides in his letter recognition. Group games are a great way to allow the students who are struggling to watch other students model the skill for them and to get involved in the process of learning, rather than passively being shown the concepts.

About Alexandra Berube
Alexandra is the Managing Director of Boston Tutoring Services, a tutoring company that offers one-to-one in-home tutoring in Massachusetts. She is also a former Kindergarten teacher who also tutors students in grades K-8, in all subject areas, including test preparation.

Guest Blog Post: Fractions, Decimals, and Percents--Interrelationships in Mathematics, Applied to Test-Taking Strategy

Fractions, Decimals, and Percents--Interrelationships in Mathematics, Applied to Test-Taking Strategy

By Alexandra Berube, bostontutoringservices.com

Being able to memorize the most common fractions, decimals, and percents, is key to performing well on standardized tests. I prepare students for the ISEE and SSAT tests regularly, and this is one of the most important concepts for them to mater. In many types of math, you need to be able to manipulate different forms of the same amount, such as 25% =1/4 = .25. Or, 10% =1/10=.1.

Understanding the interrelationship of these will make solving word problems so much easier. Many problems will ask them to find the percent of something, and they need to understand why the word 'of' in this case means 'times' (X). To solve 10% of 100, first I need to show them that 10% is 1/10, because a percent means the number over 100 (such as, 78% means 78/100, or 30% means 30/100)--so 10% means 10/100, which reduces to 1/10.

Then I show them why 1/10th of something means 1/10 times something. I draw a grid with 10 columns, and I show the student that 1/10 of those is one. So 1/10 of 10 is 1. I have to translate this into 1/10 times 10 is 1. I show this as: 1/10 X 10 is 1/10 X 10/1 (because any integer becomes a fraction if you put it over one--when you divide an integer by one, the result is the original number). 1/10 X 10/1= 10/10 which reduces to one. I do this in a number of ways with a number of percents that have been translated into fractions, until they understand that the percent of something means the percent times that number.

Furthermore, knowing certain concepts and the shortcuts you can use with them is crucial in test-taking strategy. Knowing that 10% of something means you are lopping off the last zero, or moving the decimal place over once to the left, such as in 10% of 80 equals eight. If they can do this in their head, they can save so much time.

In the same way, they should know that any percent of one hundred is that number (25% of 100 is 25). There are a million shortcuts like these that adults who have been using math for decades will not even think about. All adults have our own shortcuts that we apply on a daily basis, but explaining these to students is crucial, because we can never assume they will adopt these shortcuts on their own.

Yet it is extremely important to introduce the shortcuts at the appropriate times, once they already understand the longer way to solve a problem. I will show them that 25% means 25/100, which can be reduced to 1/4. 1/4 of 100 means 1/4 times 100, which is 100/4, which is 25. You can't skip any steps and assume that they will make these leaps on their own.

About Alexandra Berube
Alexandra is the Managing Director of Boston Tutoring Services, a tutoring company that offers one-to-one in-home tutoring in Massachusetts. She is also a former Kindergarten teacher who also tutors students in grades K-8, in all subject areas, including test preparation.

Guest Blog Post: Introducing Multiplication to a Student with Different Learning Needs

Introducing Multiplication to a Student with Different Learning Needs

By Alexandra Berube, bostontutoringservices.com

The basis of my math instruction is always to move from one concept that the student firmly understands and then apply that concept to the next level of mathematic reasoning. In working with my favorite third grade student, I found the opportunity to introduce multiplication to him. This student was born with Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum (a complete or partial absence of the corpus callosum, the band connecting the two hemispheres in the brain), and I wrote about him in a previous blog post. He learns concepts in a completely different order than most people would expect. He is still solidifying his addition and subtraction facts, and adds and subtracts any amount, including one plus one, on his fingers. And yet I know that he is often ready for more advanced concepts, and that these advanced concepts will actually help solidify previous concepts that he is still working on mastering.

In his third grade class, the student is working on geometry, including perimeter of squares. This was the perfect opportunity to introduce multiplication. In a square, all the sides are the same size. If he has a square with the side length of two, then he will do 2×4. I worked with him on this geometry concept for a while with different shapes such as pentagons, hexagons, and triangles: any shape that has sides of equal length. He quickly grasped this concept and then we moved on. I like to use a dry erase board in my instruction, because it's another form of media (‘media’ used loosely, I suppose) than pen and paper, and it allows the student to draw shapes and manipulate the written material in a new way. I had the student make shapes of his own, and we would see how many sides that shape had. We would give each side a length, and then see what the multiplication problem would be as a result.

We then worked on the worksheet I've included a link to here, which shows pictures of groups of objects (for example, four triangles with three stars in each triangle). It asks the students to write an addition problem (so, in this case, three stars four times, so 3+3+3+3) and then the multiplication problem (3×4). He picked this up very quickly, and so we moved on to the last game of the session.

Using a pair of dice, we played a game to visually show the amounts to be multiplied. First we rolled one die, and then drew the dots shown on the die on a piece of paper. We wrote the number value above the dots. Then we wrote a multiplication symbol, and then we rolled the other die, which would act as the 'multiplier.' The second die dictated how many times the first die would be multiplied by. So if the first die was a four, we drew four dots, put a four over it and then a multiplication symbol next to that. Then if the second die was a three, we wrote the number three next to the multiplication symbol, and then drew four dots two more times for a total of three sets of four dots. This way he could see why we were multiplying--we were adding the same number a multiple of times.

He then added all of the dots on the dice and found out that 4X3=12. Below all the dots we wrote 4+4+4 (the addition problem like on the worksheet I just described), to further enforce that multiplication is an extension of addition. He'd already mastered adding groups of numbers, so this was the next logical step. He smoothly transitioned into a student who understands the basis of multiplication. Of course, he's not going to be memorizing his multiplication tables in the near future, but he understands what multiplication is now, and he grasps that it is an extension of addition that applies in real life.

About Alexandra Berube
Alexandra is the Managing Director of Boston Tutoring Services, a tutoring company that offers one-to-one in-home tutoring in Massachusetts. She is also a former Kindergarten teacher who also tutors students in grades K-8, in all subject areas, including test preparation.

Guest Blog Posting: How to Support a Student with Unique Learning Needs

How to Support a Student with Unique Learning Needs
By Alexandra Berube, bostontutoringservices.com

Teaching my second year of Kindergarten, one of my students came in with a rare condition: Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum. This is a complete or partial absence of the corpus callosum, the band connecting the two hemispheres in the brain. It was not known how deeply this would affect his development, but his learning would clearly be shaped entirely by his brain’s ability to share, process, and store information. 

I should explain that I am not a teacher with a Special Education background--I have a Master’s Degree in Early Childhood Education and I am certified in this field; however, I was not trained to teach students with Special Needs beyond how to incorporate modifications into lesson plans and how to read an IEP. I had worked with students with Asperger’s, Sensory Integration Dysfunction, ADD, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Autism, but never had I had complete responsibility for the education of a student with needs such as these. 

This student is now in 3rd grade, and I have had the honor of being able to watch him grow, tutoring him on and off ever since he graduated from my classroom. Tutors are often assigned students to work with, not knowing what to expect, and they are being given the opportunity to test the limits of their creativity and their patience. It is truly an opportunity, a gift, to have this chance to bring out what this child has to offer. 

Over the years I have watched this student learn everything backwards. By that I mean, in order to hear a rhyme, he had to be able to read the word first: Do cat and hat rhyme? They both visually end in ‘-at,’ so yes. But he couldn’t hear the rhyme. 

He can do multi-digit addition and subtraction, with carrying and borrowing. But he has to count on his fingers, even to subtract 3 from 3. Theoretically, he can’t do math facts in his head at all. Each year, we have retaught him how to add and subtract, and he has several strategies that work for him--he physically ‘catches’ the small number and counts up to the big number to subtract, and ‘catches’ the big number and adds the small number from there for addition. It’s tactile, and that’s how his brain allows him to add and subtract. But it does seem illogical to watch a student add 2 plus 3 on his fingers and then see him add 23,908 to 13,208 with carrying, with ease.  

This is not how children are supposed to learn, according to common belief. You are supposed to teach children in a certain order, because that’s how their brain develops. But what if their brain needs to develop a different way? What if their brain makes connections in a completely new and circuitous way, that leaves you, the tutor, baffled time and time again? What if that’s okay?

Tutoring a student who learns differently, for any reason, means shedding your beliefs of what is the right order to teach content. It means not drilling in one concept over and over until they get it, because you think they can’t move onto the next concept until they get this one. 

All students learn in leaps and bounds, which may mean skipping over one concept, moving onto the next one, and weaving back around, ‘absorbing’ that ‘previous’ concept into their learning schema long after it logically makes sense for them to do so. 

Every student deserves the chance to learn at their own pace, and it takes understanding on the part of the tutor that this may be the right way for them. 

About Alexandra Berube
Alexandra is the Managing Director of Boston Tutoring Services, a tutoring company that offers one-to-one in-home tutoring in Massachusetts. She is also a former Kindergarten teacher who also tutors students in grades K-8, in all subject areas, including test preparation.

Guest Blog Posting: Giving Writing Purpose: 3 Ways to Get Beginners Excited About Writing

Giving Writing Purpose: 3 Ways to Get Beginners Excited About Writing
By Alexandra Berube, bostontutoringservices.com

After teaching Pre-K, Kindergarten, and First Grade, I’ve had the opportunity to watch writers from the very first solitary ‘m’ (“Look, I wrote a story about my mom!”), to chapter books about dinosaurs and princesses. The key moments are those times when children have the opportunity to make meaning of writing, to take writing out of a task or a worksheet and put it into the world. 

Comic Strips
When children are beginning to understand that letters carry meaning, they will use one or two letters to convey an idea--usually the first letter and/or the last. It is very tiring for children to try to write long ideas if this is their current skill capacity. 

Children love to draw, whether it’s representational (“That’s a tree with a rainbow”), or symbolic/action-based (“That’s how I run around and that’s where I jump from...”). If you give them a comic book template (blank squares side by side, large enough that they can draw in each one), they can ‘write’ out their story. 

Once they’ve drawn in each square, they can narrate what’s happening. Depending on their ability, you can either write for them, sounding it out as you go (modeling); you can help them sound out key words and then write the other words yourself; or you can help them sound out all the words to their best ability of invented spelling. 

This builds meaning into the process of writing, because it serves the purpose of narrating their story. Young children often forget what they are trying to write about as they go, because they are so focused on the letters. This gives them the chance to first put down their story in pictures, and then write the best they can without losing their idea. 

Labeling the Room
Children love to make their written work visible, out there in the world for all to see. With just a pad of sticky notes, have them label everything they can. Again, their abilities will vary--some will be able to just write the beginning sound of t for table; some can write beginning and ending sounds; some can add in medial vowels. It’s a great assessment tool of how much they can do. They can run around the house and label everything they can see. It gets them up and moving, interacting with their world, and showing the purpose of writing--to inform, or share meaning.  

Scavenger Hunts
First, they have to hide something somewhere--this gets them up and moving and is just fun. There are a few ways to do this. For a simple treasure hunt, they would write a clue and you would use the clue to find the item. This can just be a letter, a word, or a sentence, depending on the student’s level. 

The next step up is having them write a clue to one spot, and then write another clue from there to the item. It’s going to depend on the abilities of the student--a Kindergartener should only do one or two steps, but a 2nd or 3rd grader could do much more elaborate scavenger hunts. 
For older students, this is a great opportunity to introduce rhyme and poems--for each clue, they need to write a simple rhyme. You can take this up through every grade level. 

If there is a parent who can join in, you can have the student write out the clues, help them place them in each location, and have the parent follow the clues. This is a lot of fun for young kids, and again gives them purpose for writing. 

About Alexandra Berube
Alexandra is the Managing Director of Boston Tutoring Services, a tutoring company that offers one-to-one in-home tutoring in Massachusetts. She is also a former Kindergarten teacher who also tutors students in grades K-8, in all subject areas, including test preparation.