Section 1 - Daily Tip List

Effective tutoring requires appropriate training and careful planning. However, this does not mean you must have a degree in education. If you spend hours and hours helping your own children or others read, you’re already a tutor. Becoming a tutor is easy, just say you are one. There are no state or licensing requirements at the time of this printing. All you need is the ability to present material in a way your students can understand.

Let’s get started with a list of tips.

Check over these tips before you begin each day of tutoring.

• Be prepared for each lesson. This helps you move quickly from one activity
  to the next without wasting time. Make sure every part of your lesson is at
  the student’s instructional level. Challenge the students, but don’t frustrate
  them with material that is too advanced. (Don’t worry. I’ll show you how.)
   
• Be positive. Show your students you care through encouragement and
  positive feedback. Many students deal with years of failure in reading. You
  can help them overcome this. Praise goes a long way.
   
• Be attentive. Make sure your students get your full attention during their
  sessions. Provide immediate feedback after an error. Immediately record
  information and observations. Also, if you tutor in your home, be sure to
  eliminate distractions. (e.g. Don’t take phone calls and do make
  arrangements for your children.)

Section 2 - The Reading Process

Two-thirds of people learn to read without a struggle. They never think about the complex system their mind went through to acquire this skill. The other one-third are left frustrated and perplexed. This is why you and your services are so important. These students need help.

I debated how much information, research, and philosophy of reading should be put in this manual. There is an immense amount of material on reading available. You do not need to know it all to become a successful reading tutor. However, you do need to know enough about reading to understand why the strategies are necessary and when best to use them. This section teaches the reading process so you will understand the importance of each assessment, along with the activities you will use with your students. My goal is to help you be able to help others read.

With that, let’s break down this complex system called reading and get on with being exceptional tutors.

The following shows the four components that makeup the reading process.

COMPREHENSION

Decoding            Sight Words            Language

Comprehension (understanding) is the only purpose for reading. Decoding, sight words, and language are all vital parts to successful reading. These three components allow us to read the words correctly and fluently enough to comprehend. Each of these is equally important. Proficient readers are strong in each of these areas. The students we tutor struggle in one or more of these.

These four components are really the basis for the whole training manual.
Decoding, sight words, language, and comprehension are the areas you will assess
during your first one or two sessions with each student. From the results of the
assessments, you will develop an individualized program. This program includes
lesson plans, activities, strategies and monthly progress reports. Each of these will
be developed according to the student’s unique needs in decoding, sight words,
language and comprehension.

Now I will explain each area.

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The goal in the decoding area of reading is to break down a word and sound it out. (I use the words ‘sound it out’ and ‘decode’ interchangeably.) This is where most students struggle. They often lack the skills to decode unfamiliar words.

Students need to be able to:

• Associate letter names to the actual letter symbols (e.g. the letter names in the word dump are d-u-m-p).
• Associate individual sounds to the letter symbols (e.g. the sounds in the word pout are /p/ as in pig, /ou/ as in out and /t/ as in Tom).
• Combine these skills to sound out words (e.g. the letters f-u-n make the sounds /f/ /u/ /n/ and combined make the word fun).
  
  Before a student can be expected to do this they need phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify individual sounds (phonemes) and pull the sounds apart and manipulate them. For example, the phonemes in the word heat are /h/, /ea/, /t/ (that’s identifying the individual sounds). Heat has three phonemes. And the order of the phonemes in heat is /h/ being first, /ea/ being second and /t/ being third. To manipulate the sounds requires the ability to tell what the word “heat” would sound like if one took away the /h/. Phonemic awareness allows readers to tell the difference between words that use the same letters. For example, tap, pat and apt - the sounds and number of letters are the same but the order is different.

Phonemic awareness is necessary for children to have in place before they can learn to read. When students develop phonemic awareness they are well on their way to becoming successful readers. This is because they have the building block skills, (skills necessary to learn more difficult skills) which make it easy to: 1)sound out words (decode), 2)recognize words, 3)spell words, and 4)be aware when they make a reading error and have the ability to correct it themselves (self-correct). Continued development of phonemic awareness skills during the process of learning to read enhances and strengthens reading skills.

Many students seem to be born with the ability to easily learn the phonemic awareness skills necessary to become successful readers and spellers. Some acquire them as they are read to at a young age, but many struggling readers seem to have serious trouble with these skills. Often they struggle by only memorizing words rather than also understanding how letters and sounds make up the words.

Developing phonemic awareness involves the senses of hearing, seeing, and feeling. For example, let’s take the word peach. We hear the sounds, /p/, /ea/, /ch/. We see the written letters that make these sounds. If we watch ourselves in the mirror, we see our mouth moving in a certain way to make each sound. We can also feel our mouth pop open to make the sound /p/, kind of smile to make the sound /ea/, and our lips get round and stick out while pushing out air to make the sound /ch/. In reading instruction, using the sense of feel is often overlooked. I’ve had struggling readers make tremendous growth after the sense of feel was included in instruction.

Phonemic awareness and decoding activities are where I spend the bulk of my time with many students. However, it is still just one part of reading. Going back to our four components of reading, we are reminded that we still must include sight word, language, and comprehension activities as needed.

Now, we will cover the SIGHT WORDS component of reading and discuss the importance of identifying sight words.

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The goal of the SIGHT WORDS component is to identify sight words quickly. Sight words are the common words that show up most frequently in print. These words are in just about every sentence of every story we read. For example, the previous sentence uses six very common sight words--are, in, just, about, of, and we. These words are included in Dr. Fry’s First Hundred Instant Words. (Dr. Fry’s First Thousand Instant Word List is included in the Assessment Section.) Identifying these words instantly is vital to fluency. Some of these words can be sounded out but many cannot.

The first hundred most frequently used words make up fifty percent of the words in books. Students should recognize these words by sight without having to sound them out.

Typically, five minutes of each lesson is spent in the sight words area.

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The goals of the LANGUAGE component of reading are 1) to understand the meanings of words and 2) to arrange words to form complete, grammatically correct sentences. Students’ background knowledge plays an immense role in the language area. People with large vocabularies and who speak with complete sentences do not struggle in the language area. Their knowledge of words and sentence structure allows their minds to anticipate or figure out a word that would make sense in the sentence. Also, this same skill allows readers to go back and self-correct or fix a word read incorrectly. This is because either the error affected the meaning of the sentence or the error caused the sentence to be incomplete.

Here is an example of how language skills (vocabulary and context clues) aid in reading. Let’s take two readers, Reader A and Reader B. Reader A knows a lot about football and chooses a book on football. Reader B chooses the same book but has never heard of football. They both get to the sentence, “The quarterback completed a pass to his wide receiver.” Both struggle decoding the words ‘quarterback’ and ‘receiver.’ Reader A figures these words are quarterback and receiver after reading, “The _____ completed a pass to his wide _____.” He was able to do this thanks to his language skills. Both words are part of his oral vocabulary and he understands the game of football. Therefore, by using context clues he knew the words, quarterback and receiver, made sense in the sentence. Reader B doesn’t have these words in his oral vocabulary, so he continues to struggle. Until these words are added to his oral vocabulary and he obtains an understanding of the game of football (background knowledge), he will not be able to use language skills with this sentence.

People can have very strong language skills and still struggle in reading due to weaknesses in decoding, sight words or comprehension areas. Let’s now cover comprehension.

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The goal of the comprehension area of reading is to understand and get meaning from text. This is the entire purpose for reading. In the four components of reading, comprehension is above the other three components–decoding, sight words, and language. The reason being, decoding, sight words, and language skills are necessary to read accurately and fluently enough to comprehend. Readers needs to have decoding skills to read the words correctly, sight word skills to increase fluency, and language (vocabulary and sentence structure) skills to understand and anticipate words. These are important to aid comprehension, but do not guarantee comprehension.

Comprehension requires the ability to read words correctly and fluently and then make meaning–not just meaning from individual words, but meaning from the whole of what is being read. This is done by understanding one sentence, then building upon that understanding by relating it to more sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, and on and on. Comprehension involves making a connection with words to get meaning. This is vital for critical thinking and understanding the whole or gestalt of what is being read.

During my first year of teaching first grade, I remember being excited about how fluently and accurately one little girl was reading. I shared my excitement with a wise colleague. She proceeded to tell me about her experience with some students with strengths in decoding, sight words and language but not comprehension. This happened to be the case with this little girl. She could correctly and fluently read the sentences. She definitely had strong decoding, sight word, and language skills. However, if I asked her even a simple question about what she read, she couldn’t answer correctly. Everything she was reading was going in one ear and out the other. She needed comprehension skills.

Comprehension is the only purpose for reading. Students will find joy and satisfaction in reading when they are able to understand what they read. This will be the key to their success in many aspects of life.

We’ve now covered the reading process. Readers must have strengths in decoding, sight words, language and comprehension to be proficient readers. Struggling readers have weaknesses in one, two, three, or possibly all four of these components.

The remainder of Part A will train and prepare you with step-by-step information to become a successful tutor. You will be taught how to pinpoint your students unique strengths and weaknesses in each of the decoding, sight word, language and comprehension areas. Then, I will teach you how to use this information to develop an individualized program to help your students succeed.


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The Training Manual "How to be a Successful Reading Tutor"
includes the following sections:

• Daily Tip List
• The Reading Process
• Initial Assessments and Individualized Programs
• Activities and Best Practices in Reading
• Lesson Plans and Organized Student Files
• Incentives and When to Use Them
• Advertisement Strategies
• Letters of Introduction and Contract
• Monthly Progress Reports
• Billing

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