Steph Lane Tutoring

📊 PICTOGRAMS 📊

She went from “not sure” to creating her own brilliant pictogram in one session!

We did some pre-teaching for the Summer 2 term ☀️

Focus: keys and how to create, complete, read & interpret pictograms.

Keys bigger than 1 or 2 were tricky at first 🤔 so we did extra work on those. By the end, she was devising her own questions!

Her example: picnic blanket = 10, showing how many picnics were had each season 🧺

Pre-teaching = confidence for the term ahead.

I'm so proud of her growing confidence 🤩

☀️ LEARNING OUTSIDE ☀️

We made the most of the lovely sunshine and took our learning outside today 😎 The focus was money. Using different coins, we made given amounts using different combinations of coins. Then we moved onto rounding amounts to the nearest 10p using a hundred square as a visual aid. She grew in confidence just in this session that she decided to attempt the last few questions without the hundred square 🥳

💷 MONEY 💷

My Year 4s have been learning about decimals in school recently so we put decimals into an everyday context...money 💰 We set up a shop 🛒 each toy/item had a price tag and I created questions for the children. For example, I gave them 3 toys to buy and asked them to work out the total. I also gave them budgets and set them the task to see how many items they could buy within budget 🛍 It was also a good opportunity to recap place value and focus on how to line up decimals when calculating totals. Not only was this activity fun but it also ticked off many Maths topics: addition & subtraction, place value, decimals and obviously, money! It is a very open ended activity, you can set the budget as high or low as you like and play around with different price tags 🔖 If you give it a try, I hope you enjoy it as much as we all did!

✖️ TIMES TABLES ✖️

This week we’ve been putting our times tables knowledge to the test in different ways. We’ve tried times table puzzles, fitting the pieces together to match up the questions and answers 🧩 It challenges the children to find the answers to different questions but also think about where the pieces go to match up with the other sides of the shape. We’ve also looked at times tables in a grid, in a random order, to really test knowledge 🤔 To make this into a game, you could set a timer and see if your child can beat their score from their previous turn ⏳

📝 SATs BUSTER 📝

With SATs just around the corner, we did a SATs buster session 💪 Looking at the results of mock past papers she had done in school, we pinpointed the questions she needed to recap 📍There were common topics that repeated so we did some practice on a whiteboard and made poster pages in her book to look back on 👀 She is making brilliant and noticeable progress which has been commented on by her teacher, parents, herself and one very proud tutor 🥳 Her hard work paid off when she scored 39/40 in a mock Maths paper 👏

Is your child sitting their SATs soon? Or perhaps you know of someone in Year 6 looking for a confidence boost in readiness for SATs 💫 Get in touch today, I'd love to support them with recapping topics and feeling ready to tackle their SATs with confidence ✨️ or as we like to call them Special Agent Tasks 🕵‍♀️

✨️WEDNESDAY WARM UP EP 5✨️

We've reached the final episode in this mini series. 'Boggle' or 'Countdown' is a great warm up for English and spelling focused sessions. Pick 9 letters at random or chosen by you to focus on a spelling pattern. Set a timer and see how many words the child can think of in the given time. It helps with phonics knowledge and spelling patterns. You can encourage the child to look for letter blends and spelling patterns like sh, pl, ing, ed, er. It is fun to repeat the same 9 letters and see if the child can beat the score from the week before.

⭐️ WEDNESDAY WARM UP EP 4⭐️

A bit of a different warm up this week that is another game based activity. Dobble is great for pattern spotting and focus. It helps work on eye tracking to find the matches between cards. I have used this warm up with some if the children I tutor with dyslexia and we love playing it! A quick and fun warm up perfect for any tutoring session whether English, Maths or 11+ focused. Come back next week for ep 5, the final episode in this mini series of Wednesday warm ups! 🧠