Mrs Hoadley's Home Tutoring

One of my pupils had a maths test at school last week where she scored 73%, which is up from 52% from her last test! I'm so pleased with her work ethic and commitment, it has clearly paid off :).

Looking at different ways of saying 'said' to make speech more interesting.

With great excitement, we learnt about fronted adverbials to add more information and variety to our sentences. I used one in the sentence above, can you spot it? Notice that they always have a comma when used at the start of a sentence.

Jumping in on social media trends to keep my young teenagers engaged... Tell Me Without Telling Me. Instead of writing directly how a character may be feeling, we can create stronger imagery by using implicit language describing the person instead. For example, instead of saying:
'He was scared as he hid...'
you could say:
'His heart pounded in his chest as he hid...'

A great activity to start being able to count in 5s. Lots of kinaesthetic learning to help with memory retention and understanding. We also played a game where I would write or say a number, and he had an action to complete depending on which times table it was in:

5x table only he had to do a star jump,
10x table only he had to put his hands on his head,
both 5x and 10x he had to spin around,
neither 5x nor 10x he had to sit down.

Strangely, he never had to put his hands on his head, can you work out why?

A group starter activity of matching literary devices with their definitions. Definitely more fun than just writing out the definitions, and a good way to engage as a team. They then produced some brilliant paragraphs analysing Aldous Huxley's 'Panic', and were able to use quotations from the poem to back up their ideas.

Some algebra to kick off the new year. A good way to combat the post Christmas slump too!

Breaking down some factor trees. There are other ways to divide 48 by and still get the same answer, which way would you do?

Teaching new vocabulary (complete with meanings and spellings) can be a fun activity. We use little pictures (among other techniques) to help remember what the word means, and in this example she was able to write all of these from memory. This pupil is only Year 1, but always rises to the challenge.

I never go tutoring without my trusty whiteboard and pens. Whatever the subject, it can always be made more clear with bright colours!

A colourful way to practice number bonds to 10. It doesn't matter which way round the numbers are added, they still make 10!