As parents prepare for the coming summer and consider their children’s needs, they may be pondering the advantages of summer school vs summer tutoring. Both have similar benefits, but also different structures and other distinctions that should be considered. Tutoring 4 Less offers insight into which academic programs you should opt to best advantage your children over the summer months!
Differences Between Summer School and Summer Tutoring
Some of the major differences between summer school and summer tutoring include:
| Summer School | Summer Tutoring |
| The entire class receives the same lesson plan. | Each student receives a different lesson plan. |
| Groups can be up to 35 in size. | Small group settings or individual tutoring (2-4 maximum). |
| There is a set schedule for classes. | Flexible schedule for classes. |
| Curriculum books are used. | An online platform is used. |
| Teachers intermittently monitor progress. | Progress is consistently checked via the online platform. |
| Must attend class at school. | Can attend at home or at Tutoring 4 Less’ Tutoring Center. |
| The same program is taught to students regardless of learning style. | Each tutoring program is tailored to a student’s learning style and academic need. |
| Parents discuss progress with teacher after summer school program ends. | Parents discuss progress with tutor after each session. |
Why Summer is the Best Time for Tutoring
Families most commonly turn to tutoring services because kids are struggling, even falling behind, during the school year. The issue is often a skills or knowledge gap. Kids working with a tutor benefit from the one-on-one focus, but in order to get caught up on the class material, focus often has to be split between new content and study skills. Summer is different, however. Not only are students fresher, because they are not at school for forty hours a week or longer, they have no new content to focus on (except high school students, who may have reading lists they are expected to start on over the summer break). That means that tutors over the summer can focus on providing their students with the skills they will need for the next year, whether those are:
- Reading and writing
- Number sense
- Assignment planning
- Time management/prioritization
- Note taking
- Researching/independent learning
As little as an hour or two of summer tutoring sessions a week can pay off massively when your child hits the ground running in the next academic year. It can also avert the summer slide: the atrophy of study skills through lack of use during a long break. Summer slide is a considerable issue that educators first identified decades ago, and can set students’ academic skills as far back as a month every summer. Over the course of a child’s academic development, that can add up significantly.
Taking Advantage of Summer School Tutoring
One of the main issues of summer break is that while students may be on break, parents are most likely not. It can be difficult to help your children prepare for the next academic year and get them in the right frame of mind for learning, especially elementary school-aged children. This is a major advantage of summer school tutoring: parents can have a professional prepare their kids for school. Tutors will expand children’s skillsets, particularly study skills. Some students might prefer if they spend their summer vacation at home, and simply have a tutor visit for several hours a week. The advantages of this approach include greater comfort levels for students, a better attitude (they don’t feel like summer is being taken away from them by more school), and greater receptiveness.
Additional Benefits of Summer Tutoring
Test prep, such as for the ACT and SAT, is a good choice for summer tutoring. Students can build confidence by working on their test skills outside of the standard school environment with its myriad distractions, steeling themselves for the test environment and coming up with strategies to avoid undue stress or fatigue.
Summer tutoring can even be a support option for summer school. Often summer school teachers are doing their best to compress months of coursework into weeks, and students can struggle to keep up with the relentless pace. A tutor who can hone in on a student’s learning style and address it directly can have an immense effort, not only on the student’s progress during summer but the rest of their academic career. Sometimes, all that is needed for a student to prosper is for a tutor to show them the way that they can leverage their learning style’s advantages for themselves.
Talk to us about arranging summer learning for your child!
