TUTORING ISABELLA

Isabella is 5 years old and is a pupil at Ysgol Mair primary school, which was actually the primary school that I also went to when I was little. The tasks that I did with her were homework given to her from school, school competition and small activities that I came up with that I thought would help her. Isabella's homework mainly consisted of spellings and reading a short stories out of a book that had levels. With the spellings we went through them by saying them out loud, maybe giving an example of the word in a sentence, covering it up and asking her to write the word down. When it came to the reading, I let her do all the reading that she could, only helping her out with the longer words and guiding on how to pronounce certain words. Working with Isabella for a number of weeks allowed me to see her progress. The books she was given became a level higher and it became she became quicker at the spellings. It was great to see her excel and we also made a strong bond. She became accustomed to seeing me every week and I was sad to say that I wasn't going to help her anymore when my exams were looming and I had to focus my time on my work. With the competition, she had to design a logo showing peace. We discussed many ideas and what peace meant and it turns out all her hard work payed off because she won! The small activities that I made up were simply improvising with what I had at the time. For example, we were working on the dining table and there were a bowl of fruit. I got her to name them and tell me the colour and from there I added other fruits into our game that weren't in the bowl but she didn't name them because I had to tell her! All in all it was a great experience and I enjoyed it very much. It taught me how to interact with children, how they need extra attention and patience. While Isabella was learning from me, I too was learning from her.