Liberal Arts Tutoring

For elementary school students who hope to improve their reading ability and comprehension skills, unique lesson plans will be made in order to play to their strengths and help them enjoy reading.  For students who are struggling with the building blocks of reading -- sight words, sounding out words, knowing the sounds of different letters, etc. -- lessons will be comprised of material such as phonic exercises to improve the students abilities to help themselves when they are stuck, themed sight words to facilitate learning within schemas, and practicing reading and writing stories that they have created themselves to understand the power and joy of written language.  Emphasis will be placed on tailoring materials to the child's interests and allowing them to guide what topics we cover in order to promote a joy of reading at a young age.  This will create a strong foundation that children can use as they grow as readers and writers.  To elevate comprehension at the elementary school age, students will be presented with various developmentally appropriate texts in a range of forms.  By examining poetry, persuasive writing, nonfiction texts, stories and more, they will learn to actively think while they read.  Basic questions about the text like, "What is this character's name?  Can you draw a picture based on the descriptions?" will familiarize the student with reading to find critical information.  Students will then learn to create their own tools. They may create a set of questions they ask themselves before reading a text, identifying speaker or tone, or working on different reading techniques so they can self-asses and examine where they are getting stuck in a text.  

For middle school and high school, depending on the students goals, emphasis can be placed on analytic reading or different types of writing.  While these two go together and can be taught together, there are also students who have a hard time articulating their ideas in an essay cogently or can write clearly but have trouble picking up on themes.  Students will be exposed to texts that they find interesting, once again allowing the student to guide the types of materials they want to practice with.  For analytic reading, students will be exposed to as many different approaches as possible.  Working with single phrases on sentence structure and word choice up to novels, narrative arc, and themes gives students a range of skills that can be applied to any genre or form.  For academic writing, students will learn how to create their own structured process.  For example, different ways of pulling quotes, outlining methods, and self-editing routines.  While students may start with more rigid outlines such as "hook, taper, thesis" for their introductory paragraphs, they will learn to write with their own voice and how to change writing styles based on the assignment.  Perhaps most importantly, students will learn how to take their ideas and form them into compelling and supported theses.

I am a current student at Columbia University with experience teaching from a preschool to high school level. I received a score of five on both the AP English Literature and Composition exam and the AP English Language and Composition exam and have been nominated for the Wallace Gray Prize for best Literature Humanities essay in the class of 2024 at Columbia.