Clara James Tutoring
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Trying to grow a love of reading in your child
Reading Together
In this post we are exploring ways to make reading together a fun and enticing activity — for kids as well as the supervising adult.
The Common Reading Scene
A parent and child snuggled together to read…. The child is thrilled with excitement, and then that joy vanishes. The adult corrects or points out your mistakes with every other word you read, and now what should be fun, feels like a chore. Parenthood-gone-wrong happens, when frustration creeps in and before you know it, tears replace smiles.
Reading is hard for a lot of kids to learn but fostering a love of books in them is so crucial. In addition, reading is an excellent way to acquire vocabulary and spelling also function as a well-deserved rest.
How to Make a Good Reading Experience
1. Reading Together: Read as a Team! Read sentences or paragraphs aloud, providing a time-space to do so. Allow your child to be in the driver's seat and keep it fun and light-hearted.
2. Begin with Picture Books — These books have lots of pictures and very little text. Building an independent love of reading without the pressure creating your own stories together .
3. Be Supportive: Just tell your child the word if they struggle with it. Flow with the story and "use sound(s)" for exploring difficult words in conjunction with clues within the story.
4. Choose Stories Based on What Your Child Loves. If your child struggles to read 5 or more words in a piece of content, this will probably prove to be too hard, so look for an alternative simpler text.
5. Mind stress: If either of you become anxious, take a break. We want to keep it fun, so think positively and stay cool.
6. Read Together: You read quietly next to your child. This allows children to listen and practice reading along, which builds their confidence. It works like them reading along to an audio book.
7. Celebrate Every Win — Acknowledge every effort! Cheer when your child recognises a word that they didn't previously recognise or completes a sentence. It boosts their moral,
Fun Reading Games
Reading Cards: A game we use at Clara James is to create a set of 'cards' containing an image of something the child is interested in or your family pet, them, etc. Amongst the picture cards, also have some blank ones. Deal half the cards each. Take turns drawing a card, and whoever draws the card reads this next part. It is a fun way to alleviate some of the pressure!
Themed Board Games: I've mentioned the dotty board game before. It works in a similar way to the game above except this time you will need 3x 6 images on a sheet of paper. Spread them around the edge. Each of you picks an image. (You can be a puppy, I'll be a dinosaur. The other image might be an ice-cream). If anyone lands on the puppy, you have to read. If anyone lands on a dinosaur, I read. Then if anyone lands on the ice-cream, you roll again and do a forfeit (have another go, read another page, etc). The goal is to spread the reading, ease the pressure and to make it more fun for everyone involved.
Silly Sentences: One of my favourite games when we are focusing on structuring sentences, handwriting, or punctuation, is silly sentences. It’s easy to create and can be quite funny. A couple of people I’ve played it with in the past haven’t enjoyed writing sentences that they see as not making sense rather than bizarre, but I will explain it just in case you want to give it a go.
Write, maybe 10 or so sentences along the lines of:
The black cat ate quietly.
The orange fish swam quickly.
The old dog snored loudly.
The green parrot flew gracefully.
The wise owl looked eagerly.
Once you have all 10 cut them up and put the face down in piles of openers, adjectives, noun, verb, adverb. Then individually shuffle each pile.
The first person then takes a word from the top of each pile and writes it down to create a new ‘silly sentence’. They might reveal something like: The orange dog flew gracefully. Other times you might get something less inspiring such as: the black dog ate eagerly.
You can use multiple adjectives if you want to which will make the sentences more entertaining and descriptive, but it very much depends on your focus.
Enjoy it though, and I hope you get some ‘interesting’ results.
Celebrate Progress
And don't forget to celebrate every small win. Celebrate the accomplishments of your child with the family and think about modest rewards. It helps build confidence.
We want to make sure that when it comes to reading for a child, its all joy and absolutely no fear.
Happy reading!
Happy New Year - Jan 2024
Happy new year!
I hope you’ve had a brilliant break over Christmas.
I know some people have been on holiday, others have been enjoying family time at home. Either way, I hope it was fantastic.
Someone sent me a Christmas present just before the bog day, but I have no idea who it was from, so I can’t say thank you. I feel really guilty as it seems like bad manners, but it was just in a box from M&S with no message attached.
This year, I have committed to send out the notification when the monthly membership bundle goes live, but I am also going to send out an (initially) fortnightly newsletter with suggestions for revision / secondary school Math / English, then in the alternate week a newsletter with suggestions for the primary subjects.
If either of them isn’t relevant, please either let me know and I will ensure you just get the primary or secondary newsletter if you want it, or just click unsubscribe (but then you also won’t receive the email about when the bundle goes live).
My goal is to keep you more in the loop as to what is happening. For example, we occasionally put free courses on Udemy – we’ve just done one on angles – here’s the link if wanted. It was created to promote the topic book we have also created; we’ve also got revision planners for students that might be suitable for some GCSE parents.
At Christmas we also had some free times-tables colouring sheets which you may not have been aware of, so like I say, it may not be of interest to you, but if it is, at least you’ll be aware of it. I have 3 revision planners and 3 angles topic books to give away if you’re interested. Let me know and I’ll happily pop one in the post for you (or give it to you if I’m likely to see you…).
If you do have one, if you could give it feedback on Amazon (I’ll send you the link) that would be hugely appreciated.
Happy new year for now and warm wishes,
Dawn
Times Tables - Jan 24
Hi,
Last week I sent out an email saying I was going to try and commit to sending out an email at the beginning of each week on ideas to support primary school children, then later in the week about supporting secondary school children.
As a result, I was asked if I could also send out some ideas to support the 11+.
(Again, if this doesn’t concern you let me know and I’ll try to ensure that you don’t receive them).
I’ll send the 11+ emails on an alternate Wednesday as I normally have Alfie, my grandson on a Tuesday and the odds of getting much done with a lively 2-year-old for company…
There will be some cross over between primary school and secondary school subjects, but at any stage there is something you specifically want me to help with, please do shout.
So, back on subject, sorry…
Times tables have always been one of the key subjects that I work on with, specifically primary aged children, but also secondary school children, and often the parents say they’re awful at them as well…
I don’t suggest learning them in chronological order.
If you do, you’ll hit some of the much harder ones before you get to some of the easier ones.
Instead, what I suggest (and you’ve probably heard me say this before) is that you start with the 10’s, 11’s, 2’s and 5’s as they do in school.
Then deviate across to the 9’s as there are so many tricks to help you to learn them.
Then the 6’s or 7’s. Crazy I know! But they are quite simple if you split them so that 6x8 becomes: 5x8 + 1x8 = 50+8 Or 7x8 becomes 5x8 + 2x8 = 40 +16 = 56.
From there you can pretty much work in any order.
The 12’s is also straight forward as we can split it into 10x + 2x which would give us the same answer as 12x.
There are more suggestions on the times tables over in the Clara James Approach, or I have a sequence of emails which sends out once a month with suggestions on how to learn each of the times tables with some resources. If it would help, the link is here: Support your child with their times tables - The fun way! (sendfox.com)
I hope that’s helpful and not just waffle.
Like I say if there is anything specific you would like us to focus on, please do give me a shout.
Have a great week and warm wishes,
Dawn
Hand Writing Support
Hi,
I hope you had a good weekend.
Something I am often asked about is supporting hand-writing skills.
At a young age this may relate to the hand muscles in the hands not yet being fully developed and I have a few suggestions that may help.
As the child gets older, you may want to find the support of an occupational therapist to provide some suggestions.
1. Start big: I guess it’s a bit like parking a car. When you are first asked to park a car, you wouldn’t want to park in a narrow gap, you’d hopefully save that until you were more confident, more skilled. Handwriting practice is the same, using a big piece of paper is far better than trying to squeeze your imperfect shapes between two narrow lines. Even better, (if the weather is more forgiving) start by using water to paint on the side of the house, a patio or footpath). Use large movements and as these improve start to shrink it down to what is expected inside a school exercise book.
2. Jenga: I love this game and we’ve adapted it by writing numbers of the bricks so that we can practice number bonds or the times tables, we’ve also got grammatical terms on others so that we can also practice those. But the skill and care needed to remove the brick from the tower without it all tumbling is a great way to practice the fine motor skills which will in turn support handwriting.
3. Colouring is another suggestion: keeping the colouring inside the lines is another skill that requires practice and patience. Again, the strokes used in colouring can further aid the shapes created when writing letters.
4. Sewing again requires the use of the fine motor skills needed for neat handwriting. You may just do a normal running stitch on a square of fabric, or you may decide to make something or use a more elaborate stitch. Either way I hope this helps.
5. Playdough and clay are other great early interventions to building up the muscles in the hands. The stronger and more developed the muscles are the more precise we can be with our writing.
To be honest, anything that needs to be precise will help. Many crafts and building activities help.
For some people, messy handwriting is always an issue.
There are a couple of members of my family whose handwriting I always struggle to read, yet they are so intelligent. It doesn't seem to add up. But my daughter says, if she doesn’t write quickly, she can’t remember everything her brain is throwing at her. Her brain works at such a speed.
I used to tutor a girl a couple of years back. I hadn’t realized her mum was an invigilator for the A’ levels at the school my youngest went to.
Not long after Hay sat her history the mum asked me if my daughter was doing her exams now.
Yes.
Does she do History?
Yes. Is she called Angel?
Yes.
She said, I thought it must be your daughter.
I have never seen anyone writing so quickly. I expected sparks to come off that page!
There are many reasons why people have scruffy handwriting, sometimes it needs to be investigated and like I say, if you are worried about it, it might be worth while trying to get in touch with an occupational therapist.
Sometimes, practicing using the suggestions above will help. Sometimes, like with Hay, it’s just one of those things that make them, them.
I hope this has helped a bit.
Have a great week and warm wishes,
Dawn