Now and Next Tutoring - Jade Norman

Happy new year! ✨

It has certainly been a while since I've been on social media. The past six weeks have been so busy!

This is a message to confirm that my books are closed for the time being! Interested parents may contact to be added to a wait list. 📕

What a first term! I tutor wonderful children in the evenings but also tutor/deliver interventions in a wonderful school, 1:1 and in small groups during the day time. It's been incredibly busy but a lot of fun.

The lovely E has joined the Now and Next family and it was super lovely to meet her. 🎉✨

E lacks confidence so our main focus is to build that up and hone in on the basics. A longer term goal will be for E to have a comfortable understanding of place value and the four operations.

Being Taylor fans, we decided to acknowledge her re-release of 1989 by focusing our starter on place value and calculations inspired by it! It helped me see how she approaches a range of questions and was a quick but effective tool for engagement. I can't wait to get cracking! 🖤🖤

J prefers maths to English so to make sure she was engaged and enjoying writing session we did all our planing by annotating on the laptop! We chose a theme she was interested in and decided we'd be professional authors and type out her work. Her handwriting is beautiful so building her typing skills seemed like an additional bonus!

When we ended our session, she said: 'I'm proud of myself today!' which is one of the best things to hear. 🖤

Home and back to it after an incredible week away in New York. Looking forward to seeing some of my lovely children this week! ✨

A fantastic activity for promoting discussion, encouraging creativity vocabulary and evoking some indignant passion involves 'nonsense' pictures, like this one of a very cheeky lion chilling by the fridge. 🦁

There's smiling cheese on the shelf, a tiny elephant bathing in the sink, an iron on the top shelf, tiny decorated eggs in the door and a tiny gingerbread man escaping! 🐘🥚🧀😊

In this case, I wrote some notes as my tutee told me what was wrong. I asked some careful questions to encourage use of modal verbs and elicit more detail through use of adjectives and prepositions. We then took a look at another one but this time, I asked my lovely girl to write about it. We focused on the language device's we'd discussed and used it as an opportunity to recap colons, bullet points and commas in lists.

Silly but some serious SPaG skills utilised! 💪 🧠
Image from the fantastic SALT resources by

A big, heartfelt thank you! My first half term outside of mainstream education and a classroom setting and I can't tell you how grateful I am to everyone who:

✨ Has liked, shared and engaged with my social media content,
✨ Has recommended me to people they know and
✨ Booked their children in to work with me and have been so kind in their feedback.

My biggest thank you goes to the amazing children I've worked with so far! It's been an absolute joy and pleasure to work with you, compete against you in the games we've played, have a laugh with you, listen to your stories about school and the activities you like to get up to and play a part in your education. I work with a bunch of absolute gems. 🩷

Happy half term! I'm taking my first big trip away since I lived in Australia. New York, here I come! 🍎 ✈️ I'll be out of office from 23rd-30th October but will reply to any messages as soon as I'm back. I've got some availability so if you want to get cracking as soon as I'm back, get in touch! ✨

Lovely little afternoon reflecting over what we've been getting up to here at Now&Next. Writing some end of half term reports to email out to parents - I like to keep them up to date with what we've covered, what misconceptions we've addressed, how their child learns and behaves and what's coming next!

I've got a couple of available spots if you're interested in tutoring after the October half term! Get in touch. :)

Ending our first half term with some revision of number and place value! We've considered our responses to statements such as:

'Always, sometimes, never: Numbers with three decimal places are always bigger with numbers than two decimal places.'

Using decimal place value counters to understand exchanging! Tactile, visual and engaging activities are really important in cementing conceptual understanding.

This little lady took no prisoners in a game inspired by NRich's Nice and Nasty game. She beat me 2-1!

We loved using the decimal place value counters to support our understanding today.

If you...

🧠 Have a child eager to have a go at an 11+ entrance exam and want an easy way to help them,

⁉️ Don't know what to pick with your child as their next big read,

🤔 Want to know which books will challenge your child with new vocabulary and themes,

🤹‍♀️ Want to think of one less thing when you're already busy,

Or quite simply...

🎄 Want to see what you could add to the Christmas shopping list.. ⭐️ 75 days to go! ⭐️

Send me a ❤️ to my inbox or in the comments below and I'll send you my UKS2/11+ recommended reading list! Some good reads for high school kiddos too...