Journaling: A Great Tutoring Tool

I always tell tutors to write duing their lessons. It's perfect reinforcing vocabulary, teaching new concepts, setting up for your next lesson, and so much more! But they always ask me how to go about it. My answer: Journaling! Here are a few tips to getting your journaling underway:

1. Go to Walmart just before school and stock up on a few composition notebooks. Composition notebooks are the BEST choice for journaling. Loose-leaf papers gets lost and torn, and it's too much worry to let your learner bring their own.

2. Plan it out. It's sometimes a good idea to wing it, but journaling takes structure, especially if your learner isn't used to writing. You can make your prompt about what you're learning, something they like, or something you'd like to know about them. Anything works as long as they're writing!

3. Take a good look at what they've written. You can find tons of material for lessons in this. What do you notice? Look for: fragmented sentences, misplaced puncuation, misspelled words, and poor vocabulary. You can use journals to teach these concepts, then use it to reinforce them.

4. Build. At this point, you should be able to make all kinds of lessons from the journal. You can do free-writing, more complex prompts, and much more!

At first, working with a journal seems like a big task, but once you see how much you can do with it you'll realize its worth. If you get stuck, go online for journal prompts. One book that I love is Unjournaling (check it out!).