Tutoring Resources

Tutoring Resources

Literacy Tutoring

Frontier College's Tutor Guide for Reading and Writing with Children and Youth is an excellent resource for tutors working with struggling readers. You can find the complete guide at

They also have a page full of other useful resources at

Reading Rockets has an excellent explanation of various methods for tutoring reading called Tutoring Strategies for the Primary Grades which you can find at

Blogs and Websites with excellent information and advice for teaching reading & writing (and lots of free downloadable activities and worksheets)

(resources & ideas for upper elementary)

(resources & ideas for middle & high school school students)

Pinterest and/or Google – search for teaching blogs or for specific teaching topics and you will get dozens of sites and printables

Teachers Pay Teachers – teachers create teaching resources and put them up for sale (usually for only a few dollars each) but there are also a lot of free samples available but PLEASE do not copy ideas from this site without paying for them, these are hard working educators who deserve to be paid for their work

Lots of useful free printable activities & games for reading & writing skills

Word Solving Strategies

a)Decoding: phonemic awareness

b) Decoding: Chunking – lists of Word Families (phonograms), vowels teams, etc.

The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists (available at Toronto Public Library)

(excellent printable anchor charts to use with students: starting sounds, consonant blends, digraphs, vowel teams)

c) Decoding: spelling rules

i) 6 Types of Syllables

Syracuse City Schools, Six Syllable Types, retrieved from

click for literacy syllable division – enter this into a youtube search and you will get a series of videos that show you how to do syllable division and how to teach it to your students

ii) Core English Spelling Rules – word endings, prefixes & suffixes, plurals, soft/hard letters and more

Cheney Public School, (2012-13). Suffixes, Prefixes and Root words (excellent source for Latin & Greek roots), retrieved at

Dorothy Greenald, (2007). Phonics Lessons, retrieved at

Reading from Scratch: Spelling Rules, at:

Oxford Dictionaries: Spelling Rules & Tips at

Maeve Maddox,(n.d.) Five Spelling Rules for Final Silent e, retrieved from

d) Sight Words: Lists of Phonetically Irregular Words – words that cannot be decoded using phonics and must be memorized (NOT the Dolch or Fry lists which are lists of high frequency words not phonetically irregular words)

(go to section called “Red Flag Words, pg 16-17)

- ways to practice spelling words, especially sight words

www.resourceroom.net/readspell/6waysspelling.pdf

Fluency

- what is fluency & how to teach it – overview

- lots of different fluency activity ideas with lots of free printables

- reading races (“reading & re-reading”)& many other useful literacy activities & games

- instructions and printables for using “scooping” (practising phrasing) to improve fluence

Reading Comprehension

- questions to ask to model reading comprehension

- the anchor charts provide nice summaries of different reading comprehensions skills & strategies

- teaching reading comprehension

Writing

- these are examples of teacher's blogs showing how to teach certain writing concepts

-sentences & sentence structure

- paragraph structure & different ways to teach it

- various ideas to get kids writing

Of General Use

a)Worksheets

- sites for downloading worksheets for all types of reading (& writing) activities and worksheets

b) make your own worksheets

c) online stories that can be read out loud and/or listened to as the students follow along (helps to increase their higher level vocabulary, sight word recognition, and fluency)

c) Literacy Games (this is just one site, there are many of them of varying quality; pbs is one of the best)