Start out your tutoring hour by making a connection
The first 5-10 minutes of your tutoring session, get to know your student!
• Ask about the student’s day
• Tell a clean joke and ask if the student has one to share
• Ask the child’s favorite thing about school
• Ask about their teachers
• Tell a story about your own life—about your kids, your grandkids, when you were in school
• Ask them one good thing that happened that day
After you have spent a few minutes talking, have the student make a journal entry. Younger children can draw pictures but older children should write. Possibilities for short journal entries include:
• What was one good thing about your day?
• Something positive you talked about during your ice breaker
Overall, these journal entries should be something positive—that way, at the end of the tutoring week, students can look back and remember all of the good things that happened to them!