ECU TF/MS Sophomore Tutoring

by Kaitlin Bunch (sophomore)

Beginning tutoring as a sophomore this year has been really interesting. I have enjoyed it so far. I tutor a little boy named Josh and he is a first grader here in Greenville. He is really sweet and smart. Josh and I have assignments we have to complete together every week. They are assigned to us by the coordinator. Sometimes we have to read and I ask him questions, other times we make graphs, and we also do other types of math. Some of our projects are short and easy to complete within the hour time span, others are more lengthy and can be kind of tough to complete. No matter what the assignment though we try to have a good time doing them. Some of the assignments are completely new to him and it takes him a while to learn it and comprehend what we need to do. Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out to teach him the new material for the day.

One example of this is when we had two assignments for the hour; one was to graph and the other was to count by twos and threes. He hadn't even began to learn to do this in school yet and was really confused. This assignment not only tested him but me as well. It was a little bit out of my comfort zone because I didn't want to teach it to him in a wrong way. We used counting "bears" (little plastic bears, the center uses for practicing counting) to "play army". Josh was the sergeant and I was the general. Josh was in charge of his bear troops and I would give him orders of how to set them up in ranks of twos or threes. We started with three sets of troops, each set with two bears and we moved them around, and Josh would count them by sets. We gradually got larger and larger armies from there. By the time our thirty minutes for this exercise was over, Josh could count by twos up to ten and by threes up to 9. It may not sound like too much but we really made a lot of progress and he was very proud of himself.

I like this year of tutoring better than last year's tutoring because it is more one on one and I can see our success. I do miss all the children from the school though, but it has been nice getting to know Josh and figuring out what works best for him learning new things. Sophomore tutoring has been a great experience and I look forward to the rest of the year!