Rockford University Intern gives perspective on tutoring

We are fortunate to have interns from Rockford University on a regular basis. They come to GiGi’s Rockford excited and willing to learn. Here is Michelle Ladwig’s perspective of her time getting ready to have her first Literacy tutoring session with participant, Michael. This is what she wrote:

Michelle Ladwig
Literacy Training on Michael
During the first day of literally training, at first I was nervous about tutoring Michael because I have never tutored in my whole 16 years of schooling. Since I did not have any previous tutoring experience I watched the videos before the first session to get ideas of what to do during literacy training that Morgan had sent me. Once I watched these videos, I felt calmer about tutoring for the first time. When I did end up meeting Michael, I did not feel nervous anymore because of how kind and generous he was when he introduced himself. Another thing I thought to myself was I am about to graduate college I can do literacy training! After meeting his mom and talking to her she gave me a lot of information about Michael and the types of things he enjoys doing.
The first thing Michael and I did was look over his binder to see what things we’d be doing during the next few weeks. The first thing Michael and I did was we went over a review to see if he advanced from the previous time he had tutoring. He surprisingly did all of the vocabulary on the list. He only read a couple of the words wrong, but then corrected himself after reading the words. After doing some of the review I grabbed two books so he could read. I chose a level G book and a level H book to see if he was able to read both levels. He did great on the level G books, but had some difficulty with reading the H book because of the bigger words the book included. After reading the two books we started to play some word games. Michael liked the magnetic words that you read what the words are. After playing two different bins I decided to grab another activity where he had to match a body part to the word. It was helping with his reading and also was helping with remembering what all the body parts are.

Tutoring at GiGi’s Playhouse Rockford is a great way to give back to our wonderful community. It is not as scary as you may think. Come join us and help us to inspire and empower individuals with Down syndrome to succeed in life.