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The children are doubtless enjoying the summer break; however, studies show that a typical student forgets up to a third of what they have learned over the school year during the summer holiday! For parents, there is an obvious motivation to extend learning outside of the classroom and stop the ‘brain drain’.  But what can be done to maintain mental fitness, so a student is best placed to return to school in September ready to learn?

Discuss education goals

Getting some focus on longer-term goals for the coming academic year can be a fantastic way to boost motivation. It is equally important to create shorter term ‘stepping stone’ targets to break down bigger targets into more manageable steps in the right direction. An effective goal should be challenging enough to provide motivation, but achievable enough to be realistic. The opportunity for growth in education lies between the student’s comfort zone and their ultimate aspirations. Shoot for the stars, and the moon is still a very good result!

When setting goals with the student, be sure to focus on the development of skills rather than just achieving outcomes. Appreciate that the journey is at least as important as the destination. Help the student to identify areas in which they would like to improve and develop a plan to achieve the stated outcomes.

Engaging Summer Activities

Education is not confined to the classroom, and the summer break is a great opportunity to encourage extra-curricular activities, as well as sneaking in some education hidden cunningly within some fun activities everyone can enjoy:

Day Trips

A stereotypical view of a museum might see it painted as a tedious place, but museums have themselves been all too aware of this and have taken steps to be more engaging for modern audiences as well as ensuring they provide entertainment for visitors of all ages. Visits to zoos and aquariums are great fun as well as being packed with science-learning opportunities. Similarly, local castles or stately homes can be history brought to life. A quick search on the Internet will return local options and visitor reviews. Why not book a few day trips and enjoy some hands-on learning opportunities!

Rediscover reading

Many local libraries offer summer reading challenges to inspire students to lose themselves in books. Taking part in one is a good opportunity to encourage reading outside of school, as well as providing a welcome break from the computer screen over the holidays.

Thoughtful screen-time

If your house is like my house, you’re not going to be very popular if you try to ban video games and ‘tablet time’. Probably a much better idea to influence it positively by finding some games and activities with some educational merit. Game developers are surprisingly crafty at working some useful learning opportunities into their products, so take advantage and make the most of enthusiasm for ‘games’.

Going away? Make it count

Going on holiday can be an amazing educational experience. Encourage research on holiday destinations and potential places to visit once there – extra reading and world-wisdom abound! Older children could help plan activities, understand travel arrangements and budget their spending money.

Creative play

Imaginative play is very important, but it’s something which the demands of school life beyond early years often makes difficult to accommodate in the school day. This makes the summer holidays an ideal time for delving into imagination. A box of old clothes for dress-up could be a good start, ass well as holding on to old boxes and food cartons for arts and crafts projects.

Enjoy the great outdoors

Physical activity helps children develop coordination, concentration, teamwork and problem-solving; all of which translates wonderfully to a classroom setting. If you have a garden, or even a few pots on a windowsill, encouraging your child to get green-fingers with a packet of seeds for a little science lesson. And maybe some healthy snacks in a few weeks!

Employ your little helpers

Summer holidays are to be enjoyed, but that doesn’t mean that the children can’t help out a bit around the house. Engage everyone in creating a rota of jobs that need doing and figure out between you who is doing what. Encourage some independence and develop life-skills. If you’re feeling generous you could even pay them, providing opportunities for budgeting and imagination – how will they spend their wages?

Best of all every option listed above, with the exception of a trip away, is possible at a low cost, or even no cost at all!

Build Mental Strength

Many people believe that their level of intelligence and ability are fixed, and whilst that may be true there is no way to be certain that a student has arrived at their personal limit. We believe at Tutorially™ that every day is a school day, and opportunities to learn and develop are all around us.

Experience suggests that students who believe that they can get better are more likely persist during difficult challenges, seek out better feedback, enjoy learning more and have higher levels of self-esteem. The summer holidays are an ideal time to help your child develop their mindset.

It is important to foster a growth mindset, helping students to realise that hard work, good quality feedback and an openness to hear it, and the sustained pursuit of improvement build the fastest route to success. We learn from failure, and frankly, if you don’t fail now and again you’re probably not trying hard enough. A resilience to setbacks is an extremely important skill for everyone to master, no harm in starting as soon as possible!

Rest and Relaxation

The summer holidays are a chance for everyone to recharge their batteries after the challenges of the school year, and whilst maintaining some of the momentum built over the break is great, balance is as important here as it is in all other aspects of life. All work and no play…

Sleep is important, and with it taking weeks to make or break a habit, the school holidays are a great time to reset. The importance of sleep shouldn’t be underestimated, with a good night’s sleep being linked to better memory, concentration, alertness, immune system and decision making. It is recommended teenagers get an average of nine hours sleep a night. During the summer holidays, sleep patterns tend to change, with children taking advantage of the holidays by staying up late and lying in longer in the mornings. I is important not to entirely lose sight of good sleeping patterns.

Common sleep mistakes for children including watching TV right up until bed, being on their mobile phone when in bed and consuming caffeinated/energy drinks just before bed. None of these is conducive to successful sleep

And with the basics covered, make sure you both take time and make time to enjoy the holidays. Children have worked very hard over the school year and rightly deserve some time off to enjoy themselves. The summer holidays are a great time to refresh and recharge. With careful bit planning and subtle nudging from those around them, it can also be a great time to help develop key habits that will stand everyone in good stead for the coming year.

Enjoy the Break!

From everyone here at Tutorially™, thanks for all the fantastic work you’ve done over the academic year. If you choose to fill your summer with profitable tuition work, we’ve got the tools to help you succeed. If you’re planning to enjoy your break and make ready for the coming year, frankly we don’t blame you for that at all either! Enjoy your well-earned break.

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A Private Tutor Survival Guide to the Summer Holidays

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A Private Tutor Survival Guide to the Summer Holidays

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The school summer holidays are upon is - the kids are off school, and the teachers are sat with their feet up for the next 6 weeks! OK, so at least half of that is a lie but daily life is certainly different for teacher and student for the next month and a half. Whilst having a well-deserved break should be ‘Job 1’ for the mental health, wellbeing and basic happiness of a busy teacher, there are also massive opportunities to be found in the summer weeks.

We all know that every day of teaching is precious, and we also know students will typically fall back a bit over the holidays – the lack of daily study having a detrimental effect on progress in education. This set of circumstances is made even crueller by the fact that many modern school systems will evaluate students on entry into the school or new school year, benchmark them against their peers and establish expectations for the coming year. Set from a lower base capability off the back of a long summer break, this can result in a lowering of expectations and, ultimately, result in outcomes that do not reflect the true capabilities of the student.

Summer School!

Happily, there is a solution and one you are in a perfect position to offer – well-structured summer holiday tuition! I’m not sure who groaned louder at that prospect, the student enjoying the summer sunshine or the teacher who longs for a holiday the other 10 months of the year. There is one group who absolutely didn’t mutter under their breath at the idea though – the parents, and the parents are very likely to be your paying customer as a tutor. Parents want the best for their children of course, and as parents ourselves, Tutorially™ know as well as any other parent how often the ‘I’m bored, what can I do?’ refrain echoes around the living rooms and kitchens of family homes worldwide. Keep the children occupied for an hour and improve their educational outcomes? Awesome. Maybe even keep it light and fun so the kids are motivated rather than crushed in their holiday time? Even better. Make some serious money to fund a holiday whilst making your life easier for the rest of the academic year by improving student progress in education? Feels like we’ve got the whole package doesn’t it?

Get to it

So many extra-curricular activities come to a close for the summer break, so one of the most simple and effective things you can do to maximise tuition income over the holidays is make sure everybody knows you are still available for lessons! You won’t believe how many tutors completely ignore this period of the year, literally leaving money on the table. And somebody will profit from that, it might as well be you!

All the usual means of advertisement remain sensible – flyers in shops, leaflets, business cards and the like, but setting up a website is the most effective means of getting your message out to the world. If you do not currently have a website time may be a little short for getting one off the ground in time for the summer. Good news! Tutorially™ can give you some great short-cuts. Whether you choose to use your tutor profile right off the site or redirect your own custom domain name to it, Tutorially™ has you covered. We can help you with registering domain names and all the other things you’d need to do via our trusted partners, delivering you a polished and professional web presence. By creating a custom tutor profile on an already successful Internet site like ours, you can take advantage of our established position in search – putting you ahead of your tuition competition!

So now you’ve let everyone know your tuition services are available over the summer months, how do you make the sessions as much fun as possible, making the most of your holiday as well as earning some much-needed extra money over the summer months?

Find the Fun

You may very well find that whilst parents love the idea of lessons over the holidays, the students are less excited by the prospect – but there is no rule that says learning can’t be fun! Make sure to take advantage of technology to offer lessons on their terms - Tutorially’s fantastic online lesson capability enables you to teach from anywhere in the world, at whatever time works for everyone. Our online tutoring software is packed with features to make lessons every bit as enjoyable and interactive as face-to-face, and you can reduce travel time as well – maximizing the holidays for everyone!

Our advice would be to concentrate on the elements of study that your students most enjoy – maintain their enthusiasm and take advantage of the fact that they are not currently chasing down the next test score or entrance exam. The goal here is to keep the ball rolling by keeping up the good work you’ve been doing all year and prevented the dreaded summer slip backwards. Make sure to incorporate learning games into the rotation – the sessions will be much more fun for everybody! Try to avoid lengthy tasks and walls of text – the summer temperatures make it much harder for everyone to focus.

With those temperatures in mind, try to schedule lessons in the morning and evening to avoid the worst excesses of summer sun – mid-morning is likely to be popular with students; not so early that sleeping in is disrupted, but early enough in the day that the session is complete and the rest of the day free for enjoying with family and friends. And that goes for you as well as the students! Also, make sure to keep everyone properly hydrated during sessions since keeping everybody comfortable gives you the best chance of positive outcomes.

Thank You!

From everyone here at Tutorially™, thanks for all the fantastic work you’ve done over the academic year. If you choose to fill your summer with profitable tuition work, we’ve got the tools to help you succeed. If you’re planning to enjoy your break and make ready for the coming year, frankly we don’t blame you for that at all either! Enjoy your well-earned break.

Ready to join us? Everyone registers free with Tutorially™ - Sign Up today! Find students, publicise your services and benefit from the best online tuition software in the UK! You can keep up with the latest Tutorially™ news by following us on Twitter, and liking us on Facebook.

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How to Build a Tutor Website

The single easiest and most cost-effective thing you can do to promote your tutoring business is to get yourself a website set up. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of companies that can assist you in this effort, and you can pay pretty much anything from a few hundred pounds to several thousand, but it is preferable to do it all yourself - from the point of view of cost obviously, but also as you’re going to want to update it frequently to keep your audience engaged.

Setting up a website can be complicated, and the steps required are laid out in this article. If setting it all up yourself seems too daunting, skip to the ‘Easy Options’ section further down.

Domain Names

You will need a www.something.something address for people to type in when they’re looking for you. The .com variants are the most popular, and the geographical options come in second. The geographical domains like .co.uk are helpful in some respects since although you could be global in reach, anybody wanting to secure your services will be grateful for an indication of where in the world you are. You really cannot access the Internet today without stumbling over companies that will register a domain for you left and right. Make sure you read the terms and conditions carefully and remember price does not always indicate value – specifically, some of the companies offering free domain registrations only do so to tie you into a contract of some sort.

Hosting

Once you have secured a domain name, you need a place to park it. This is known as hosting, and will typically be expressed in terms of disk space and bandwidth. Should you be in the market for these things, compare available offerings and choose one that fits your budget - none will be very expensive. DreamHost and Black Chili both offer popular packages for all budgets.

Make sure the company you choose offers good performance – search engines now penalise slow performing sites, and visitors will likely click ‘back’ if your site doesn’t load in a couple of seconds. Black Chili have been independently tested by LoadImpact, and results show typical sites load 6 times faster on their platform.

Email will be included in this setup, so once you have asked a company to host your domain for you, someone wishing to send an email to you will be able to, though a bit more work is needed for a functional website.

Design

This section is where the real work is, and there is more than sufficient material on website design to create books on this subject alone. From the point of view of a tutor who needs a website, there are several shortcuts available that will make the creation of a website quicker, easier and cheaper.

Not so long ago, if you wanted to build a website you would need to master several flavours of code, HMTL being the one you have most likely already heard of. Now, if you wanted to embrace our philosophy and learn to do everything yourself in pursuit of being a rounded professional, you could be looking at several months of reading, experimenting, and in all likelihood eventually building a website that you’re not happy with anyway. You could, of course, be using that time more profitably and interestingly on tuition. Fortunately for us all, there are loads of options available to you that will make it possible to design your website without learning any code at all!

The Easy Options

Content Management Systems, known henceforth as CMS, have completely revolutionised the business of building a website. Moving the enterprise from professional design outfits to become achievable to anyone with a few hours to spare. That’s not to say you wouldn’t get a better result from a design studio, which you very likely would… but you would also have to pay for that privilege. A CMS driven website could be up and running in around an hour.

WordPress

At the time of writing, WordPress powers around 50% of the sites you see on the internet, and it has several advantages:

It is free

It is easy to install

It is easy to customise, with FREE templates available

It is easy to update, very much like a word-processing software package

It is responsive - so will display well on mobile devices and tablets

It has plugins for any function you want

You will have noticed how often we mentioned it being easy because it really is easy. Once you have found an Internet hosting company, it is all but certain they will provide you with the means to install WordPress with a click of a button. You will be asked for basic configuration details including usernames and passwords. Please write them down somewhere, because 1) you’re going to need them and 2) it would be a real shame to be locked out of your own website!

Once you have installed WordPress you will need a template. There are several built into the installer, most of which are inoffensive and ready to go. There are also template sites accessible via your favourite search engine that can provide you with templates tailored to your needs for minimal cost. For a little more they will install them for you as well, though the process is far from difficult. Pretty much all you need in either event is a logo and some content. That logo could be anything right now: perhaps a photo you have taken, a royalty-free image from the internet or something custom. There are many freelancer sites where you will be able to find someone to put together a simple logo for you for the price of a cup of coffee.

Armed with some hosting, some WordPress, and a template, we’re on to content. The basics will be:

Contact details.

A ‘Bio’ section, about you.

Details of tuition services: levels and specialisms.

This content will help your tutor website appear in search engine results, making it more likely that people searching for a tutor will find you, but for now, note that the more often you update your site the better from a search point of view. Up to date website content shows the world you are actively working in tuition, giving the impression of someone who is engaged and passionate about their work.

Web Builders

One of the coolest recent innovations in the website space in recent years has been the rise of the on-screen web builder. Armed with little more than an account with a suitable hosting company and the software you use to browse the Internet, you can create your own website in a few clicks. Companies like Wix and Black Chili provide their own variants of this system, and you’ll find a ‘how to’ video guide here, taking you through the whole process from start to finish. Using a web builder system, a full website can be created in as little as 15 minutes!

Professional Directories

Though WordPress and Web Builders have made the creation of a top-quality website a realistic proposition for you, me and anyone else with basic computer skills, there is an even easier option - redirection. With a handful of clicks, you could save all the website creation stuff full stop and get on with teaching.

From within your hosting service, your domain name can be configured to redirect to another site, so you could simply set it up to do that. Once redirection is enabled, anybody clicking on www.yourwebsite.com could be directed to social media or your pages on one of the specialist Internet tuition platforms – like Tutorially™! Once you’ve signed up, www.tutorially.co.uk/yourpage could display all your information to the world. This provides a very quick and easy means to display something informative and easily navigated to your audience, and in the case of Tutorially™ your tuition specialisms and availability will be shown, and the ability for students to book directly over the Internet is provided – a very attractive option!

If you go with this option, make sure you complete all the profile sections for contact details and the ‘about’ section. Keep in mind that this information needs to be fully public for anyone and everyone to be able to access it. The other huge advantage of using Tutorially™ is that our pages are already well indexed by Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other search engines, meaning potential visitors will find your listing easily.

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