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Fun Facts
Fun is playing with our pug, fitness, watching my child play video games (because I'm not good at playing them), and going to action-filled sci-fi movies (but ticket prices are way too high!).
About Me
I have been a tutor, teacher, writer, and editor for more than 25 years. I have worked with college and high school students. But after having to intensely tutor my child in elementary school, especially in writing, reading comprehension, and social studies, I decided to switch and tutor younger students to try to help them become stronger writers and readers before they reach middle school, high school, and college. My child found a lot of assignments either too complex or too dry (and he was nearly always right!). I am available Mondays through Thursdays, starting at 2 and ending at 8 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, remote/online only.
Experience
Here’s what I can work on with students:
- Explaining teachers' comments on a student's work
- Grammar, spelling, and vocabulary
- Short-answer questions and answers
- The elements of a sentence and how to write a paragraph
- Multi-paragraph assignments
- Stages of writing: brainstorming (and other forms), introduction, topic sentence, evidence, transition, organization, and conclusion
- Fun, creative writing
- Narration-Description and other patterns of writing
Approach
My approach to one-on-one tutoring is simple: patience, encouragement, explaining in plain English, and by simple comparison (analogy) to try to make concepts clearer and doubling back to make connections to earlier learning (reinforcement). Writing and reading for meaning grow stronger with patience and practice.
Request Me NowReading Comprehension Tutoring
Every child has memories about so many things they enjoy and have experienced. Trying to connect their lives to reading assignments makes the assignments more real, meaningful, manageable and pleasurable for them. Young students like to read about what's fun to them. They'll even endure reading a dry set of board game instructions to experience the excitement of the game. Whenever possible, making a reading selection three-dimensional and alive can make it more memorable. Gently but frequently interrupting a particular reading and inserting brief questions and comparisons can help connect young students to what may initially seem to them like a distant, dull story.
Social Studies Tutoring
I started watching TV news at about age four and grew up learning about the importance of following the news (which is "social studies and history in the making"). I even attended a Hubert Humphrey campaign speech, sitting atop my parent’s shoulders as the candidate spoke to a crowd of voters on a Brooklyn street corner. As a writer and reporter, understanding the background and history of many topics is critical. In addition, I have taken a wide range of political science (the politics behind history) and history classes such as Western society history, Jewish history, ancient Greek and Roman history, art history, music history and mass media history. I still enjoy learning about the hows and whys of what continue to shape our country and world.
Writing Tutoring
Perhaps more than anything else I love writing and explaining writing in the simplest possible ways so that people can see how easy it really can be. I like to demystify writing. I have a broad range of professional experience and have always tried to adopt and adapt that experience to each new writing situation, expanding my pool of knowledge and sharing it with students. When my son was 10, we attended a magic show at our public library, and afterward we sat in the library and he wrote a short paper for me on what he liked best about the show. I used the same writing concepts I taught to older students, explaining in the simplest ways, with lots of encouragement and gentle, guided questioning to create for him a rhythm of paragraph writing in the first body paragraph that he was able to imitate in the two next paragraphs. I shared with him the “tricks” of how to start a paper and end it. He was so happy when I told him he knew as much as my older students and did just what they do!
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