Tutoring on March 27

This week in tutoring my first job was to assist two students who were having trouble combining the important things from a few sentences into one sentence with many facts so they wouldn't plagiarize. It was actually sort of difficult for me to do! We would have to combine 2-3 sentences but the sentences were already so short and to the point that it made it very difficult! And anyways, I didn't learn about plagiarism until years after second grade!

Either way - doing all of these activities with children is really helping me learn how to break something down and make it easier to understand for children. As a speech pathologist I am going to need that skill when working with children who need to learn how to make sounds correctly. Luckily, working with speech we have the resources such as our own production of sounds and the actual visualization of our mouth to assist these children. I find it slightly harder as a teacher because with teaching a lot of things that are being taught are abstract, there aren't many visuals to work with. Yes, there are visualizations such as pictures and things, but why do we spell 4 four and for without a 'u'? -- Because we just do! If that's not confusing to a 5-7 year old I don't know what is! Teaching takes such abstract ideas and teachers must find ways around the abstract-ness of it all to help children understand.

Before tutoring I always found myself to be very nervous and uneasy when it came to explaining things to children. I was always second guessing myself. Tutoring has taught me ways around that and has boosted my confidence in working with children and has taught me ways to better teach and explain certain things to children. :)