How to get started with tuitions at home?

School syllabuses are turning tougher and deeper with every academic year. The average I.Q. of the students is also increasing. The attention spans of kids are decreasing and they want to learn things quickly. Every mom of this generation finds it difficult to teach their kids by themselves. Instead, they prefer to resort to experts in teaching. They assign different tutors for different subjects so that the kids receive the best of everything and be ready to face the competition. What's more, kids seem to listen better to someone outside the family than their own mom.  

Earlier, home makers were the people who were not good with studies and preferred to manage the household duties. Things have changed now and most of the home makers are graduates or post graduates who quit their high paying jobs to manage family. Each of you have a favourite subject and teaching someone the same will be no effort. Why not brush up your knowledge and put it for some use to the society rather than wasting it? You can earn some decent money if you can spare a bit of your quality time for taking tuitions.  

How to get started with tuitions at home?

Before you get started with something, a good amount of ground work is required. Similar is the case with tuitions. First of all you have to shortlist the subjects you are confident to teach. If you have a maths and science background, pick those up. Else if you are good with languages, pick up English, Hindi, foreign languages or your mother tongue. Similarly, if you are good with programming it will be easy to teach computers for students. If you are really confident with your subject, you can think of guiding undergraduate or research students through home tuitions.

Once you have shortlisted the subjects, collect the concerned syllabus and textbooks of the students from various classes. This will be easy as your friends will be happy to share their kids’ books with you. Go through them in detail and decide on the level you are confident to teach. Teaching kids of different levels require different methods. So try to stick to one level of students – be primary, upper primary or high school. Try to secure a copy of the study materials of those classes, as you will need to refer it frequently once you get started with the tuitions.

Also, browse through the school calendar to have a fair idea of the school holidays and exam seasons. Build a strategy that tells you how to cover the entire syllabus in advance with ease. Ensure to include in the plan the portions to be covered in each month and specifically each week. This way you can be ready with all the materials you need for every week. This will help you to analyse how many days in a week you need to devote for teaching a set of students. Moreover, this will help you to work out a strategy for assessing the kids.

Chalk out the days and timing from your calendar that can be utilised for tuitions. Check if you can work on holidays as well. Remember to fix on a timing that does not disturb other members in the family.  This way all your commitments are responsibilities will be unaffected. You can be ready with little bit of stationery as well ahead of commencing the tuition service.

Once you have geared up for taking tuitions you can look for the fees to be charged. You can enquire this with moms who are sending their kids for tuitions already. Alternatively, you can talk to other tuition teachers in your locality. When you are ready with all these ground work, you can start advertising. Talk to your friends and relatives in your neighbourhood. Even if you get only a couple of kids initially, launch your service and dedicate yourself to help them succeed. Usually the success rate of the students acts as a self booster to get more kids.

5 Tips to make tuitions interesting for kids

It is not easy to retain the interest of kids while teaching them. Here are some tips that could help you to make the tuitions interesting for the students:

• Show videos explaining the subject – With the advent of internet you get detailed explanation of everything in a matter of few seconds. You can show videos or experiments that will embed the concept quite fast into the little brains. Pictures speak more than thousand words and videos speak more than a zillion pictures.
• Teach them shortcuts to remember stuff – Quite often kids tend to mug up half of the things that they don’t understand. And during exams they forget a good amount of that. You can teach them better ways to memorise like coining the first letters of the words, relating dates and ideas to familiar stuff etc.
• Take regular harmless assessments - Surprise them with funny tests to assess the knowledge gained. Please take care not to put it as a burden on them as they are already suffering a lot in the name of assessments from school. You can do this by conducting modern assessment techniques like multiple choice questions or drawing graphs or charts, or even writing a related story.
• Assignments to improve the depth of knowledge- Give minor assignments to gain more depth in the knowledge of the subject without affecting their study curriculum. Try to make it interesting by giving them freedom to choose from a set of assignments. This way you can keep them hooked to the subject and improve their likeness towards the same.
• Be their friend – Never impose learning on any kid. Rather than scolding, try to understand the problem that hinders him from excelling. Be a friend to kids and they will enjoy learning then. They will start sharing their little happiness and sorrows with you if they see a good friend in you.

This way kids will enjoy coming to your home for tuitions. To see how far you have succeeded in teaching the kid, you have to track the progress of the kid on a regular basis. In a short span you can understand the strength and weakness of each kid. You can help them to get over their weakness and build more on their strength. This will boost the confidence of the kid as well. You might have to provide different approach to different students based on their skill set.  You can take feedback on your teaching strategy from the kids as well as the parents. That way you can keep improving yourself and a make a mark with your life.

More than a mere time pass or a way to earn some money from home; aim at educating the kid as the prime motive. Help them have an in-depth knowledge in the subject and earn good marks, thus pleasing the parents as well. Make the teaching as interesting as possible, so that studying is not a burden but a blessing and enables the kid to explore more on the subject. How good it will be if the kid succeeds in life and remembers you as the best teacher in his life!