Parent resources

How to talk to your child's teacher

Before hiring anyone, one of the most useful conversations available to you is free. A classroom teacher sees your child working for six hours a day and has direct comparison with twenty-five same-age peers — a perspective no tutor has at the outset.

Questions worth asking:

• Where is my child relative to grade-level expectations in reading and in math, specifically?
• What does the difficulty look like in the classroom — avoidance, slow work, careless errors, or genuine confusion?
• Is this something you expect to resolve with time, or is it a gap that needs targeted work?
• Has the school done any screening or assessment I have not seen?
• What would you work on first if you had an hour alone with my child?

That last question is remarkably productive, and the answer is often exactly what a tutor should start with.

When to ask the school about additional support

Tutoring is instruction, not an evaluation. If your child's difficulty is significant, persists despite good instruction, or seems noticeably out of step with their ability in other areas, it is worth raising with the school in writing and asking what support or review may be available. Doing so commits you to nothing, and it does not preclude tutoring alongside it.

Any skills review we conduct is instructional — it exists so teaching can start in the right place. What we can offer in those school conversations is an accurate description of what we observe during sessions, which parents sometimes find useful.

Supporting learning at home without becoming the teacher

The most common mistake well-meaning parents make is turning the kitchen table into a second classroom. It usually damages both the homework and the relationship. Smaller interventions work better:

• Read aloud to your child past the age they can read alone — it builds vocabulary and comprehension well beyond their own decoding level
• Let them read below level for pleasure; volume matters more than difficulty for fluency
• Keep math facts practice to five minutes and make it a game, not a drill
• Protect a consistent homework time and place rather than a fixed duration
• Let the teacher see honest work — a parent-corrected worksheet hides the information the teacher needs