Sarah

I am a hard worker with high standards and have always had excellent GCSE and A level results in Music, an extremely high exam success rate for instrumental pupils and have been tutoring English to GCSE level for the last year. I am an avid reader and learning is part of my life. I don't mind travelling to a tutees house but prefer to teach my instrumental tutees at home in Northampton as i have a music room set up to teach in.
My online sessions are £25 and i teach via Zoom.

Tutoring Experience

I have been tutoring and teaching in Northampton for 31 years. Since 2014 I have concentrated on tutoring in a self-employed capacity and through agency work with Teaching Personnel. 72% of my students last year got in touch with from recommendations by other parents.
I love my work and find I have a good understanding when students find English and maths difficult, as I found school a struggle and scraped through exams to achieve a university placement. It was only when I went to university that I found out that I was not as stupid as I had been led to believe, and that was down to the books I devoured. I cannot advocate reading enough. It teaches grammar, vocabulary and how to construct sentences subliminally. In my private tuition sessions, I have a book on the go with every tutee. We discuss what we have read but do not do any work on the book as I do not want to spoil the story and the imagery with dull but necessary exercises like comprehension. I save that task for short texts.
It is the same with maths which I thought was a foreign language earlier in my life. I love trying to help students overcome difficulties in remembering formulas, understanding the question and learning their tables. I get the students to keep a notebook to write down all the formulas and processes. Every student I have taught over the past eight years has passed GCSE maths.
Games are also brilliant, and like reading one is learning subliminally. Articulate is one of my favourite games and I use this in both subjects. I also use memory games with pairs of synonyms, antonyms and such like and these are helpful when tutoring ESL and KS2 students. Afterall, learning is supposed to be fun.
I also like to find out how the student learns and whether they are a visual, kinaesthetic or auditory learner. Tutoring is very much a two-way learning experience, and I am always looking at ways to improve my delivery and understanding of how people learn.

Tutoring Approach

My approach to tutoring, whatever subject depends on the individual needs of the tutee. Everyone has different approaches to learning and this needs to be taken into consideration. The first session i take with a tutee, is to evaluate the learning requirements and the goal that the tutee needs to achieve. It is important to communicate during the period of tuition to keep the learning objectives in line with the tutees requirements.