One of the biggest things that can be a struggle when teaching early primary school kids is focus. What kids wants to spend another hour after school learning more stuff, a factor that is exacerbated when a session is on the weekend. If even I find it hard working on the weekend, imagine how these kids feel. I digress. There’s a few ways you can try to combat this. One way is by having a break (singular) or breaks (multiple) through a session. Whether you have one break or two or three will depend per student. Some can work completely fine for 25 minutes whereas some can only manage to concentrate for 10. When I started doing this age group my instinct was to try to fight these attention deficits. But that’s not the way. You have to accept that the student can and will only focus for a certain amount of time and any time after that will just be spent desperately trying to get them to do work to no avail. So you resort to breaks. The breaks aren’t just sitting around doing nothing. Play a game, do the Worlde or something. It’s a way of keeping the student engaged in a different way and also making the session fun. If the sessions aren’t fun then the student will be even less eager to do work. It’s about finding the right balance. Some sessions will go by and you think, man we had time spent on breaks than we did doing work. That’s the nature of this business. Sometimes the students just won’t work for you. But I like to think that the time spent not working banks for next week, meaning the student will have more energy to focus since they didn’t spend it on the week before. Anyway I have now crossed the 300 word threshold and therefore I will get full pay.

Hugo Nihill