This summer I will be tutoring some students going into second grade. They both need to review first grade skills in math and reading to reinforce and retain them over the break. It's been a long time since I've done any tutoring, and then it was with older kids and focused on homework help. Any suggestions of great activities/strategies to use when working one-on-one?
I love little games where you set up two buckets or cones or whatever. Then the student has a ball, Frisbee, or horseshoe, or whatever. For reading, you can have two different letter combinations and the students need to throw the ball into the correct bucket. For sight words, my students loved timing how many they could read in a minute. Then charting their progress. The same would work with math facts.
My third grade student is very competitive and loves games. I made some using scrapbooking materials, but he really enjoyed making his own. I got a bingo marker (a marker that makes circles) and let him make a design. Then he added things like 'free space' and 'go back three spaces', etc. I made up skills cards based on his needs. We play that I can only move if I roll an even number. He almost always wins and he loves that. For vocab review, we play 4 Clues (that's what I call it, anyway). He has a list of words to choose from and I give one clue (say, contains a pair of repeated consonants) and he writes a guess. Then I give the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th clues, each a little more general. We see how early he guessed the correct vocab word.
Love the idea of making a board game. I found some old file folder games that I think will work well, too. I'm thinking the 4 Clues game could be modified to practice sight words and phonics, as well. We will definitely chart sight words and math facts! The bucket idea sounds fun too.
The 4 Clues game is very versatile. I definitely used phonics and sight words clues as that is what I was primarily helping my student with. We had loads of fun.
I really like to play Chutes and Ladders. It is basically a huge 100s board, so I talk numbers the whole time (I was on 20, and rolled 5, what space should I move to?) I either use two dice and have the kids add, a bigger # die and a regular one and have them subtract, or one die and a spinner I made with one more/one less/two more/two less
