Tutoring Services for High School Students
Content Tutoring: We provide tutoring for both standard and specialized subjects. Our goal is to help all learners cultivate the knowledge, skills, and confidence to achieve their goals.
Executive Function Tutoring: Tutors reinforce foundational executive function skills while introducing more advanced skills. These include planning and prioritizing, organization, and goal-directed persistence. EF skills help students manage their time, stay organized, and complete tasks efficiently, enhancing their academic performance and overall well-being.
Standardized Test Prep: For exams like the SAT and ACT, we provide comprehensive testing strategies, including study skills, time management, organization, and practices for alleviating test anxiety. Each session is tailored to the individual student's needs, with the goal of fostering confidence in standardized testing.
Enrichment Tutoring: Through our individualized approach, we build upon existing knowledge and skills, inspiring curiosity and a love of learning. Students are guided by tutors to delve into specialized and/or advanced topics, personalized projects, and more. Like a customizable camp, this is a great option for summer!
Short-Term Support: We offer support without long commitments for tests, projects, or specific topics, providing flexible solutions for tight deadlines. Just let us know your urgency when you contact us.
High School Skill Support
Reading:
We tailor instruction to meet the individual needs of each student, offering support for struggling readers, challenges for advanced readers, and providing personalized activities and homework help as needed. Tutors guide high school students in developing the skills needed to find success, and even joy, in reading.
● Reading Comprehension: Strategies such as visualizing, summarizing, identifying
main ideas/key details, asking questions, and making predictions/connections all help
students understand what they read. High school students are also encouraged to apply
critical thinking skills to their reading, such as analyzing, evaluating, inferring, and drawing conclusions.
● Vocabulary Development: Bolstering comprehension by building students’ vocabulary base and finding the meaning of unfamiliar words through context clues, word roots, and dictionaries.
● Fluency Practice: This can include timed readings, application of multi-syllable phonics skills, building sight word recognition, and repeated readings of the same text to build confidence and speed.
● Promoting a Love for Reading: Our tutors aim to foster positivity towards reading by exploring a variety of genres and topics that align with student interests. We encourage independent reading for pleasure and provide recommendations for books that students may enjoy.
Writing:
Our tutors guide students through the writing process of brainstorming, organizing, and crafting compelling essays, as well as encouraging creativity and enthusiasm through interest-based writing activities. Whether it's a persuasive piece or a personal reflection, our tutoring services ensure student voices shine.
● Brainstorming and Planning: Using graphic organizers like webs or outlines to help students organize their thoughts and structure their writing before they begin drafting.
● Writing Prompts: Helping spark students' creativity and giving them a starting point for writing. Prompts may be related to personal experiences, literature, or current events.
● Writing Conventions: Including grammar, punctuation, and spelling rules to help students communicate clearly. Editing and proofreading skills are emphasized to polish their writing.
● Writing Organization: Students are supported with scaffolding such as sentence frames, transition phrases, and questions to help them expand on their outlines and express their thoughts clearly in writing.
● Text Analysis: Refining students’ ability to apply text evidence to writing, such as for essays based on a novel read in class.
● Genre Study: Allowing students to explore a variety of forms, from argumentative essays to poetry. Each genre has its own structure and features, which students learn through analysis and practice.
● Voice and Style: Reflecting the author's personality and perspective; we encourage students to develop their unique voice and writing style.
● Revision: Involving rethinking ideas, clarifying language, and making improvements.
● Reflection: Helping students set goals and identify areas for improvement in their writing.
Math:
Whether they need support with algebra, geometry, or calculus, we ensure that young mathematicians stay sharp and keep their math anxiety at bay. We offer personalized attention, nurturing relationships, and a commitment to lifelong learning.
● Building Strong Foundations: Locating any gaps in foundational math concepts and ensuring they are filled before moving on to more advanced topics.
● Homework Support: Helping students build understanding, confidence, and independence when tackling assignments in a variety of high school math topics, including Statistics, Precalc/Calculus, Geometry/Trigonometry, and more.
● Math Vocabulary: Introduced and reinforced so that students can fully understand and solve problems.
● Multi-Step Math: Supporting students with problems that involve identifying and following multiple steps in order.
● Critical Thinking: Cultivated by asking open-ended questions, having students explain their reasoning, and challenging them to explore multiple solution methods. Students develop the ability to analyze problems from different perspectives and evaluate the validity of their solutions.
● Test Preparation: Empowering students to tackle quizzes, tests, and exams with confidence by reviewing key concepts, practicing problem-solving and test-taking strategies, and becoming familiar with the format of assessment questions.
Executive Function:
Executive Function (EF) skills are the cognitive processes essential to accomplishing tasks/goals and self-regulation. By working on the following EF skills (and more) during tutoring, students can develop strategies to improve their academic performance and overall effectiveness in managing their personal and school-related tasks.
● Advanced Executive Function Skills
● Response Inhibition: The capacity to think before you act. This ability to resist the urge to say or do something allows us the time to evaluate a situation and how our behavior might impact it.
● Working Memory: The ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks. It incorporates the ability to draw on past learning or experience to apply to the situation at hand or to project into the future.
● Emotional Control: The ability to manage emotions in order to achieve goals, complete tasks, or control and direct behavior.
● Flexibility: The ability to revise plans in the face of obstacles, setbacks, new information or mistakes. It relates to an adaptability to changing conditions.
● Sustained Attention: The capacity to maintain attention to a situation or task in spite of distractibility, fatigue, or boredom.
● Task Initiation: The ability to begin projects without undue procrastination, in an efficient or timely fashion.
Advanced Executive Skills:
● Planning/Prioritization: The ability to create a roadmap to reach a goal or to complete a task. It also involves being able to make decisions about what’s important to focus on and what’s not important.
● Organization: The ability to create and maintain systems to keep track of information or materials.
● Time Management: The capacity to estimate how much time one has, how to allocate it, and how to stay within time limits and deadlines. It also involves a sense that time is important.
● Goal-directed persistence: The capacity to have a goal, follow through to the completion of the goal and not be put off or distracted by competing interests.
● Metacognition: The ability to stand back and take a birds-eye view of oneself in a situation and to observe how you problem solve. It includes self-monitoring & self-evaluation (e.g., asking yourself, “How am I doing? or How did I do?”).
