Subject Tutoring

Study Hut offers subject tutoring for elementary school students in mathematics, language arts, reading comprehension and vocabulary, spelling and writing, social studies, and science. Whether students have a hard time finishing their homework, preparing for quizzes and tests, or managing long-term assignments (book reports, et cetera), we can help.

Most often, students come to us because they need to sharpen their skills for tests, because they lack some fundamental understanding of their subjects, or because they just plain don’t like school and feel discouraged. While every student’s problems are particular to him or her, we find frequently that most problems stem from the second point: some fundamental lack of understanding, some core concepts amiss. Of course tests are overwhelming when students don’t understand what they’re being tested on; of course students hate school when their studies seem designed to defeat them.

Thus our first step in elementary school subject tutoring is always an assessment, an interview. We ask students what’s easy, what’s hard, what they love and hate about school. Then with some preliminary tutoring — practice problems and the like — we probe until we find precisely what confuses and frustrates them. Then neither we nor the students are blundering around in the dark.

Once we’ve found the targets we need to aim for, we can introduce a more practical expertise into elementary school subject tutoring. This includes step-by-step instruction, timed drills, flash cards, and other techniques that allow the lessons to settle and crystallize in students’ minds. Then, when necessary, we can move on to test-taking strategies: identifying questions by type, decoding them (especially math word problems!), and budgeting time. And for those dreaded large projects, we can begin acquainting students with middle-school-level skills such as outlining, long-term planning, and independent studying.

This is, of course, an often long and always methodical process, but students benefit immeasurably from it. What they’re really learning is how to cement the foundation on which the rest of their education will be built.

Fill out a contact form to the right or drop by today at any of our locations for more information!