Madeleine T

I provide tuition for 11+, 13+ and Sixth Form entry, as well as English at a primary level. My students have successful gained entry to schools including Christ’s Hospital School, Eltham College, Ardingly College, Rugby School and Dulwich College, among others.

Primary English

I have strong experience in developing the English abilities of young children, specifically as regards reading, writing and phonics. During a year abroad in Japan, I worked as a play-based English teacher to four young Japanese children, championing the benefits of visual aids such as picture cards, household items, picture books and more. I have also worked in a tuition centre helping many young students improve their reading and writing using phonics-based work. I incorporated lots of colours, large lettering and drawing opportunities to ensure that tuition remained age-appropriate and fun. These students weren’t taking tests since they were still quite young, but marked improvements were evident.

11+ Preparation

I tutored a student for 11+ entry into Christ’s Hospital School. The student was extremely able but went to a school that was not able to support students looking to attempt difficult 11+ exams. I helped him improve his English and Maths skills at 11+ level, teaching exam techniques through past paper revision. I also helped to make sure his knowledge of the relevant Maths topics was up to scratch by giving him extra tuition in certain topics which had not been fully covered in school classes to ensure he was fully ready well in advance of the test. He was accepted into the school.

13+ Preparation

I am currently working with a student who is aiming to take the 13+ entrance test for international students at Rugby School. His reading ability was always at a decent level for a child speaking English as a second language, but he struggled to make inferences about texts, and answered questions in a rather haphazard and unstructured way. We have been working to introduce clear answer structures to his work, and have been using deep reading techniques to improve his analytical abilities. His answers are steadily improving in clarity and he is increasingly able to make sophisticated inferences about the text, although there is still room for improvement!

Year 6 English and Maths

I worked with a young girl with SEN who was getting ready to go to high school in the following academic year. She was very able in English but struggled to understand the problem solving aspects of Maths, struggled with homework tasks, and was overall very underconfident and shy. My goal was to help her outside of class time with the various topics coming up in both subjects, so that she felt that she could keep up with her peers and not lose heart. We focused on problem solving skills in Maths, using 11+-style, word-based questions to consolidate her knowledge of the topics learned in class and to get her more practice of these trickier question types. My student is now at high school and is far more able to handle homework tasks independently, receiving good reports about her progress in the subject and exceeding expectations.

GCSE Japanese

I homeschooled a year 11 student for two hours a week over a period of two years in GCSE Japanese (Edexcel). This student loved Japanese language and culture but struggled with self-motivation and organisation in a general sense. We also had fairly limited class time. We combatted this by giving her small weekly goals such as vocabulary quizzes and weekly grammar and composition tasks. This way we were able to build her language skills incrementally through short-term, manageable tasks which built her knowledge in key skill areas which were constantly in use (the vocabulary is not hugely obscure or advanced at this level, so once you have learnt terms you tend to use them fairly frequently). I was thrilled that this student eventually achieved a Grade 7, as this was a good mark given the limited time together and the self-motivation required to study such a challenging language.

GCSE English Language

I tutored a student who was sitting at a grade 5 in English Language (GCSE, AQA). We really wanted to raise his grade to a minimum of a 6. He struggled with interpreting texts and coming up with insightful answers to questions on language features and word choice. I targeted this skill through extensive reading and discussion-based tasks at first, just getting him used to reading between the lines and expressing opinions on writers’ uses of figurative language techniques. Once he had grown more comfortable with this, we then introduced exam techniques which helped him to express his ideas in a clearer and more succinct way. He also struggled with grammar and proofreading – we ingrained some editing skills into him by building a 5-minute spelling and grammar check into his writing process for each question until he edited his work more instinctively as he went. I was glad that we were able to raise his grade to the desired 6 in the end!

Hobbies