When I began my tutoring ten years ago I noticed that many of the students I work with struggled with their college prep, honors and AP reading reading requirements. Many confessed they never read outside of school, a troublesome admission since unless they read outside of school 2 hours a week, many will have trouble getting scores…
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Vocabulary building with roots & visual cues
You may not realize it, but you already know enough to help your vocabulary grow exponentially. English is a language based on Latin, Greek and Germanic prefixes, suffixes and roots. If you understand the meaning of these word parts and how they fit together, you have the tools to understand hundreds of thousands of other words….
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Learning styles
Researchers such as Howard Gardner have suggested what some parents have long suspected: There are very different learning styles and students learn in different ways. The spatial/visual learner learns from what is seen, especially diagrams and pictures. The linguistic learner remembers what is read or spoken. They usually perform well in traditional academic settings that…
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When do you need to call a tutor?
The answer is more complicated than it seems. It depends in part, on whether the academic difficulty has appeared just recently or has been a problem for a long time. In other words, has he or she always had problems with a subject such as math or reading, or is it a recent, perhaps subject…
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Why college bound students need critical thinking skills
Critical thinking skills are essential life skills; the more selective colleges seek out students with critical thinking skills because they know how to learn. Employers recruit such students because they have demonstrated a capacity Critical thinking is a form of metacognition: thinking about thinking. Critical thinking means moving from thinking concretely about a topic, such as family,…
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