How to help a student who would rather be anywhere else

For most primary school kids, tutoring can just feel like another thing they have to do after spending the whole day at school. When working with younger students I’ve noticed some are distracted and clearly not interested in the session. some kids constantly look around the room, trying to find something exciting. my first reaction was to try and keep redirecting them back to the work, but eventually I realise that repeating focus was not really solving anything. Instead I started paying more attention to what they were actually interested in. For example I had a short conversation with a student about their favourite sport and I tried bringing some of that into the activities we were doing. It was a small change with the student became noticeably more involved. They were still not suddenly excited about doing school work but they were more willing to participate. This made me think about how much of tutoring is actually about reading the situation. A child can understand the work but still not engaged with it because they are tired bored distracted or simply having a bad day treating every lack of effort as a lack of ability would be pretty unfair for me. This was a good reminder that there is a real person sitting in front of the worksheet.