Booster sessions

Most children learn basic reading, writing, spelling and numeracy skills perfectly well through high-quality classroom teaching, but what of those who struggle, may have learning difficulties or just feel like they are falling behind? How can they be helped?  

Whilst your child will no doubt be benefiting from being included in high quality teaching at school through the usual differentiated curriculum, intervention Booster sessions can help support children who may need extra support to ‘catch up’ with their peers.   They may have particular needs related specifically to literacy (often referred to as dyslexia), or needs associated with other barriers to their learning (SEN), or they might just be lacking in confidence.  My tutoring sessions involve adjusting teaching styles and strategies, giving individual support. It aims to reduce gaps in attainment and improve levels of enjoyment, confidence and self-esteem.  

Ordinary classroom teaching alone may not be sufficient to enable all children to catch up.  Receiving regular booster tutoring sessions can make a real difference by helping your child learn in different ways. 

Multisensory Learning

Multisensory activities help all children absorb and process information in a manageable way and involve using touch and movement alongside sight and hearing.

They are not only beneficial for children with additional SEN, but all learners. Over-learning and engaging in something different and hands-on excites students and heightens engagement.  Such as:

• Writing words and sentences with different materials,e.g. glitter glue, sand, paint, chalk.
• Physical activities to practice and embed spelling, e.g.arm actions, hopscotch or jump-rope, hunting for letters.

Simple Tools to assist learning

Sometimes making small adjustments and providing targeted learning support tools can make all the difference.  Such as:

• spelling word mats and phonic sounds charts
• Line Readers, e.g. rulers or coloured overlays to magnify, highlight or track a reading text.  These simple tools can help readers move through a text and keep their place more easily, especially if they experience ‘swimming’ words.
• quick recall prompts e.g. times tables grids, place value charts.

 Educational games

There are so many ways to make learning fun and if your child struggles with earning at school, they may not be too keen to do even more learning with tutoring after school.  Playing educational games keeps things interesting for your child and gets them learning without them even realising it!

Time 

If learning is difficult for your child, it is important to allow them extended time to compute and take their learning on board and avoid over-load.  Whilst tutoring sessions can be intense, booster sessions give children time to process new information and time to respond to questions or requests and retrieve words, numbers and knowledge.

Lots of praise and encouragement

The importance of this for all children can not be over-stated.  To learn well, children need to feel good about themselves, to feel valued and listened to.  Tutoring sessions provide careful nurturing to instil confidence and resilience to 'have a go' and 'keep on trying' even when some skills might be tough to master.

 Working together with parents and school

I can meet and feedback to you regularly to discuss how your child is doing and the strategies I have used. You can also update me on what methods you’ve been using at home or school and what’s been successful.

This is important because, ultimately, no two children are alike and there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.  By everyone sharing knowledge about ongoing progress and things that have worked, we can then work together to use learning methods that maximise your child's learning.