In KS3, your child is developing the skills needed to prepare them for their GCSE’s. In school, children will be reading a variety of texts including novels, short stories, poetry and non-fiction which reflect on the texts they study at GCSE. They will also be developing their creative and persuasive writing skills.
In my tutoring sessions with KS3 children, I aim to work with the curriculum to support your child’s learning, as well as using the one-to-one time to develop spelling, punctuation and vocabulary. Your child would grow in confidence in the texts they are learning, but they would also have an established routine with me (if this works for them) which would incorporate building their SPAG (spelling, punctuation and grammar) knowledge. With previous KS3 students, each lesson has started with learning new spellings, which are revised the following week and practiced throughout the term until the child feels confident with spelling these words. This is really valuable to students because, in my experience as a teacher, in KS3, there is not much time spent on spellings in lessons. This gives students a chance to improve on an area which massively impacts their grade at GCSE – as many of the mark schemes include a ‘technical accuracy’ mark which links to the ability to effectively spell. They are also assessed on SPAG in KS3.
I love teaching KS3 because there is so much to learn; as part of the expectation in assessments, children need to be aware of the historical context behind texts. This is something which your child will enjoy exploring with me in lessons. With quizzing, research based tasks and questioning, your child will create effective revision tools to help build their memory on key historical facts which need to be included in their writing. Students will also become confident in how to effectively include contextual information in their answer, as this is something which can often confuse children in a school environment, where they are not always learning at an individual pace. Success criterias and sentence starters can be embedded into our lessons – or prompt questions can be used to further challenge students. Either way, I ensure the children I teach always feel that they are learning in a supportive and encouraging environment.
With this age group, I think it is important to keep things fun and engaging. In my lessons, your child will learn using a range of different styles – videos will be implemented in lessons as well as images to discuss, we will practice our writing as well as information retrieval through quizzing and I will use a range of kinaesthetic (movement) tasks to help with a students memory of things such as word classes. And yes, movement based tasks can be done in online lessons!
In my time as both tutor and teacher, I have taught a range of texts – from ‘Wonder’ by RJ Palacio, to ‘Private Peaceful’ to poetry from different cultures. I have taught several Shakespeare plays at different levels as well as a variety of non-fiction texts, including travel writing. I am extremely confident in my subject, and even if there is a text that your child is studying in school that I haven’t yet taught, I will ensure I know it in detail before teaching it to your child.
We will work with the syllabus your child is following in school – and of course, the beauty of one-to-one tutoring is, if your child feels they need to spend more time in understanding a particular topic then we can do that. We will work at your child’s pace. Whether that be in studying a text, or persuasive or creative writing.
For KS3, I can offer online tuition or face-to-face (as long as you live in the mid Cornwall area). In this age group, I would recommend weekly lessons for either 45 minutes or an hour. An hour would be preferable in order to give us time to properly cover the curriculum and also allow time for spelling, punctuation and grammar support.
Please do get in touch if you have any questions or require any further information. I look forward to hearing from you!