Tuition Tailored to the Needs of Your Child
Regular Group Literacy Tuition at Ms Calleja’s Classroom
At Ms Calleja’s Classroom we plan lessons designed to meet the needs of your child. Danielle has 30 years teaching experience across the educational sectors. Her passions are Mental Health, Trauma Informed Practice, Two-Way Language Learning, Inclusivity, Play-based learning, Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening.
Each student will develop and grow in a way that is natural to them - play is how we learn. There is so much pressure on people to get things right, but Danielle believes that mistakes help us learn and grow, thus creating a love of learning and steady improvement.
Read on to see a few topics that are at the forefront while planning lessons.
Building a Schema
It is useful to see the whole picture so that you can understand where the part you are learning fits within it. This is why I like to show all the spelling and reading options for a sound and then focus on the most common ones. Students can store those uncommon variations and then bring them to the front of mind if they need them down the track for decoding unfamiliar words.
Cognitive Load
Sometimes there is too much going on in your brain and you can only focus on a little bit at a time and retain it in bite sized chunks. For children with brains that process information differently (dyslexia, ADHD etc) cognitive load is a big barrier to long term memory storage. This is why we do short activities and have movement breaks in between. We want to be able to focus deeply for short bursts and this is more likely to help kids store this information.
Executive Functioning
Often students struggle with initiating a task. This is called task paralysis. They get stuck in a holding pattern and can’t work out how to get started when there are so many options, or they aren’t aware of what options are available to them. This is where I am able to provide story starters or modelled responses so that they can put their foot on the ladder and start climbing from there.
Make it Visual
Drawing, graphing, tabling, labelling, highlighting, mind mapping are all ways that we can organise, problem solve, remember, learn and experiment with new information. Sometimes we use a visual to stimulate a memory and anchor that information. This is why we sometimes start with art and then move into phonics – for example a gnome colour in for the gn spelling of the /n/ sound.
Learning Together
We are social beings. Working together is not just fun, it is effective too. Peer to peer work brings appreciation for ways that others tackle a problem and we share perspectives to further our learning. This is as true for the younger students as for the senior students.
At Ms Calleja’s Classroom we care about your kids and strive to create a learning environment where everyone can shine to their full potential.
Click here to book into a tuition session with Ms Calleja’s Classroom, or to enquire about our small group or individual tuition sessions.