Written by Alonso Hu
Disclaimer: The information below is based on my personal experience with my student and can be modified based on your students’ interests.
My tutee is a third-grade student who is very interested in gymnastics and Hello Kitty. As a result, I have incorporated several methods that I believe really work for us to keep every tutoring lesson interesting and help her stay engaged the majority of the time.
1. Learn about the students’ interest
- Talking about what your students are interested in: This is really crucial to establishing an engaging and relaxing tutoring session because we all know that sometimes it can be very difficult for younger students to learn new stuff for too long a period. We all want to them to have some fun, right?
- Familiarize myself with Hello Kitty characters: Although I am not a huge fan of Hello Kitty, I often spend 5-10 minutes prior to our class time reviewing some of the characters in Hello Kitty. This plays a crucial role in making a happy environment with the student because I understand it can sometimes be especially difficult for young kids to focus on things they don’t really find interesting.
2. Themed Activities
- Problems: I design problems using Hello Kitty characters or storylines (e.g., "Hello Kitty needs 5 apples to bake a pie, but she only has 2. What is the percentage of the pie she needs?").
- "Mental Gymnastics Challenges:" I frame problem-solving as a gymnastics routine, where each question is a different move (e.g., flips for multiplication, handstands for division).
- Hello Kitty videos: During breaks, usually every 40 minutes of our math sessions, I usually let her pick a a Hello Kitty video that she wants to watch.
3. Active Learning
- Physical Breaks: Short stretching or balance exercises every 30-40 minutes can help with focus. For me, I usually allow her to do some push-ups during breaks because she mentioned that she enjoyed doing push-ups as that helped her to build her strength for gymnastics.
- Try then explain: When doing Math problems, I always ask my students to try to solve the problems by themselves first before I explain the solution. I found this step very essential both in terms of their short-term memory (for other similar problems shortly) and long-term memory (application at their school in the future).