I can’t believe we are coming into the final half of the summer term. Where has this year gone!

This past week or two I’ve pretty much said goodbye to most of the GCSE students I’ve been working with. I was thinking about it the other day as I left a lad’s home for the last time.

Some of the kids we work with we get to know over a period of several years, I’ve known families through marriages, divorces, births, and sadly one girl I worked with lost her mum during the time that I worked with her.

Although you’re not tutoring them anymore, it’s strange you never forget those you’ve worked with.

One of the first lads I ever worked with, our goal was to extend his vocabulary. Yesterday, I was playing the 5-minute-snakes-and-ladders game with someone, which is basically a mash up of the 5-minute challenge and snakes and ladders.

In the 5-minute challenge you have a list of 12 categories, and 5 minutes to try and think of 3 words that fit for each category: with adjectives starting with C, countries starting with C, 3 farm animals, etc.

In the snakes and ladders version instead of having 5-minutes we just had the categories written on the squares of the board, each time you land on a square you need to think of 3 words in the same way, but you’re not against the clock.

I don’t know how many times we landed on ‘warm weather’ (3 alternative ways to describe warm weather) but each time we did, the challenge got greater as you’re not supposed to use the same word twice. We laughed and laughed some more as our brains started to break under the pressure.

Our goal at Clara James tutoring is to make learning fun and creative. I learned many years ago that if a child is engaged, they are more likely to learn. Additionally, if we just give our child one thing to do, we are giving them one memory. If we ask them to repeat that task, may be a second worksheet we are making that stronger, but when they need to recall that piece of information, they only have one place in their brains to go to where they can find it.

However, if we use a range of different activities to help them to learn that thing, we are helping them to create multiple different memories, making it easier to recall the information when needed.

This is our philosophy at Clara James Tutoring and making the lessons relevant to the child we are working with no matter their learning style, starting place, or end goal. We are all unique and we need to celebrate that. To learn more about Clara James Tutoring, check out: Clara James Tutoring