This evening I had the pleasure of watching Annabelle tutor little Taylor!! Taylor is in Kindergarten and together, they worked on Maths and English.Annabelle did a wonderful job of keeping Taylor on task while using her iPad. We all know how easy it can be to get sidetracked while trying to focus on work – now imagine as a 6 year old!! Bright colours and infinite buttons to click on… Annabelle did a great job to make sure she was always looking at the screen while Taylor was clicking away at her activities, ensuring she always remained on task and got the absolute most out of her time at tutoring.

While going through addition and subtraction, Annabelle made great use of her surroundings – grabbing different coloured pencils to help Taylor fully understand how “adding” and “taking away” works. Annabelle also constantly checked in with Taylor, especially when she was giving her final answers, asking her questions like “are you sure?” and “why don’t we try that again?” whenever she was slightly missing the mark.

Her tone was also very encouraging and praising – it was clear to me that Taylor felt encouraged on enthusiastic the whole time, and was always keen to have another go whenever she got an answer wrong. Little Taylor also loved going through her thinking process out loud!! This was also really encouraging to watch, as it allowed Annabelle to stay on track with her student’s thinking train and intervene whenever necessary to ensure that she didn’t get too far off track and derail herself completely.Annabelle also did amazing to sense whenever Taylor was becoming restless, and encouraged her to take water breaks whenever she felt like she needed to. (Many times, we link time spent on a task with quality of work done, but rarely is this the case – especially with little kids. Much better to take shorter, more frequent breaks to allow for higher efficiency bursts of learning, instead of a long and dragged out session full of restlessness and day dreaming!!)

Really great stuff!! Thanks Annabelle 😀

Thomas Koutavas