by Seven Tafaoa

Created on: November 08, 2008   Last Updated: November 26, 2008

Children have different level of academic strengths. Some have better reading comprehension skills than others. In a classroom world, we find children with different levels of ability requiring different ways of learning. They come from different walks of life with different cultural and familial values. Knowing such fact, teachers find it difficult to work with each child at the same time. Often time after a school year, children leave a grade with different level of ability regardless of those who struggled throughout the school year. What would be the best help for them?

Summer tutoring is known to be one of the best helping services for struggling students. It is usually one on one and the setting does not have to be in a classroom. the tutor is flexible to teach the students anywhere and in any way possible. Usually the tutoring is taking place in the home of the students. The objective, though, is to see learning take place through such a service. The last thing a tutor wants is to spend the entire summer to tutor the struggling students only to find out that there is no learning development taking place.

Summer tutoring is open to integrating different teahing approaches in line with the lesson plan on the subject area the students are struggling in. This is the fun part about it because the tutor is not limited to follow the curriculum standards of the school; the tutor is the standard. All the tutor needs to know is to find out what the struggling students need help in, and he or she implements different teaching approaches to accommodate the students accordingly.

The advantage of summer tutoring is that students can have the individual time with the tutor to assist them on personal academic weaknesses that the classroom teacher, throughout the school year, could not attend to. Having said that, however, the summer tutoring service is student-based and its challenging goal is to find what works best to teach each struggling student. One student may learn well via hands-on; the other student may learn well by listening.

A tutor cannot confined merely to he or she with a teaching degree or is specialized to give such tutoring service; a tutor can be a peer, a sibling, a parent, or a technological service (e.g., computerized interactive programs). Depending on the student's preference of teaching, a tutor should provide the services the student needs to learn about a subject matter he or she struggles in.

When we think of the summer time, children live with expectancy to do fun things with families and friends other than school work. A tutor has to be prepared mentally, emotionally, and physically to face the challenge of tutoring them in the summer. It does pose a serious need for preparation, patience, and commitment to see the students learn after the tutoring is over, but in the flipside of the coin, the tutor will have experiential gains of tutoring expertise and an established rapport with the students.

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