Watching Demetria and Mason work through spelling and sentence writing was a really great reminder of the fact that tutoring doesn’t have to be overwhelmingly complicated in order to be effective!!
Demetria began by reading off a list of words for Mason to spell out in his booklet.
After 10 or so, Demetria went back through each word (one by one) with Mason, allowing him the opportunity to pronounce each word exactly as he had spelt it out.
By re-reading each word and allowing Mason to directly compare his pronunciation (based on his spelling) with the correct pronunciation of the word, he was able to identify in real time the slight errors in spelling he had made, allowing him to reorder (or change) the letters in each of his words until both his and Demetria’s pronunciations were a perfect match.
Demetria also maintained a really encouraging tone and did a super job of keeping Mason on track. Despite him getting sidetracked from time to time (scratching his desk, spinning his pencil around), Demetria was able to smoothly snap him back into work mode for another productive leg of work.
Switching over to Maths at around the halfway point, Demetria and Mason started working through fractions together.
Specifically, Demetria started by ironing out that Mason knew what the top and bottom parts of a fraction were named - the “numerator” on top, and the “denominator” on the bottom.
Once that was all clear, they got into subtracting fractions. Mason was super quick to point out that two fractions couldn’t be subtracted until both denominators were the same.
He was also really fast at identifying the number that each denominator should change to - namely, the lowest common multiple.
He noticed that in some instances, you could find it really easily by just multiplying the two together, but that in other cases, some more thought was required - because perhaps one side was already optimal and the other just had a little catching up to do!!
