8th June 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We’re always happy to help someone who wants a tutor, and most of the time it’s straightforward to understand what they want, and what the best course of action is. However, this isn’t always true when a parent contacts us requesting a tutor for primary level, particularly a student at Key Stage 1.
The thing is, parents worry. This is perfectly normal and natural, and any hint that their child might not be at the top of the class leads parents to think about how to help. Is a private tutor the answer? Well maybe, but there are lots of things to consider, and we try to ensure that parents have a balanced view of the situation, and don’t react to one school report, before deciding that their son or daughter needs to see a private tutor for an hour every week.
When students first begin primary school their ages can be so relatively different. A student who is about to turn 5 is 33% older than a student who has just turned 4, but these two students can find themselves in the same class, and understandably the younger student’s parents may be worried that the student is falling behind. The popular solution to this is to stream students at such a young age, separating them into 6 month or even 4 month age categories, but this doesn’t always happen.
Now, we’re never going to advise parents not to help their children learn, but we also want to ensure that young students enjoy learning, and develop at a similar pace to everyone else, rather than always trying to catch up to peers who are significantly older. The first thing to make sure of, is that young students have access to learning materials at home and are encouraged to do fun activities which are also educational; it’s easy to remember not enjoying schoolwork aged 16 or 18, but what we forget sometimes is that, when we were 5, learning was fun and something we wanted to do.
If a parent decides that a KS1 tutor is definitely the way to go, then the important thing is to still make the student feel as though they are playing and learning at the same time. Lessons are broken into small segments between which the student needs to be relaxing/playing. Obviously this is something parents can do themselves, but life doesn’t always allow for such consistent lessons, and as long as it’s been carefully considered, a tutor can really help.