Partners With Parents - New York City Tutoring » Family Activities

Small Group Architecture Class

jesse — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:25:02 +0000

Every once in a while a parent comes to us with an unusual tutoring request. Recently, we had one such request: an architecture tutor. As discussions and planning with the parent progressed, we decided that a small group would be the best forum for this exploration. This means we are pleased to present a new six-week course in architecture for 10-14 year olds, starting April 8^th. This class will give students a good basic knowledge of architecture and its use in the modern world. Below you will find the details including dates, potential topics, and class structure. To register, please call (212) 928-5016 or email us.

Day/Time: Thursdays, 6:00-7:30pm

Dates: April 8^th, 15^th, 22^nd, & 29^th, May 6^th, + field trip on Saturday, May 8^th

Location: Residence of the parent who came to us with the request. (W 107^th St)

Length: 1½ hours, including presentation and guided practice each session

Ages: Ten to fourteen years old (recommended)

Topics Will Likely Include

Basic Sketching: Drawing as Communication
Aesthetics of Structure: Engineering vs. Design
Room Design
Meaning and Use in Architecture
Field Trip/Observation “Scavenger Hunt” with Digital Camera

Class Structure

15 minutes – lecture/slide show
15 minutes – discussion
30-45 minutes – guided practice (building/drawing)
15 minutes – review of completed projects & drawings/clean up

Space is extremely limited so please call Will at (212) 928-5016 if you are interested.

5 Things You Can Do . . . To Help Your Child Learn To Read

jesse — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:01:23 +0000

1) Wherever you are, make life a “letter hunt.” Be it the grocery store, drug store, the zoo, or in the car, pick a letter and find it in signage and brand names. See if you can get all 26 letters. Or choose a letter from the alphabet and search your home for words that start with that letter. Try labeling those objects using a labeler or post-it notes. (Please be forewarned! Pets exhibit a near-universal discomfort in being labeled.) After naming items individually try using a different colored labels to group them by type, shape, color, or size. For example, “couch” could also end up with the labels “brown,” “soft,” “rectangle,” and “furniture.”

2) Read to your child every day. Demonstrate for your child how to read with expression. If a book has pictures, relate the words to the pictures. Even if you’re tired of a book, “Read it again!” If you are repeating an old favorite, change the words in silly ways and let your child catch you “messing it up.”

3) Give your child a newspaper clipping or magazine and have them find a letter with a crayon. CIRCLE ALL THE “T”s. Give them paper and their favorite colored marker and let them experiment with writing or tracing the letters they’ve found.

4) Spend time with letters of the alphabet that can be arranged and rearranged into different words. Make sure you have duplicates; we don’t live in a world where one “e” suffices. If your child is past swallowing age, a couple of sets of Scrabble letters should give more than enough variety for early readers. The large refrigerator magnets will do nicely as well.

5) Take your child to get his or her own library card, and then visit the library regularly. Many libraries have programs for early readers, like story time, as well as afterschool programs for older children. Books on CD, which most libraries carry, provide a great opportunity for a child to read a book independently and to hear an expert reader’s modeling.

Visiting Coney Island

admin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 22:26:18 +0000

Coney Island is real. It is neither safer nor more dangerous than anywhere else, neither pristine nor tarnished. It is where someone in your extended family proposed years ago, a magic place to which generations past have travelled from far and wide. But it is also that spot you heard was “seedy” and housed an aspect of your generation’s “bad element.” It is a place where grand dreams have flourished, and others have died tragic deaths. It’s where we have gone to talk to the girls and boys of our dreams, get sand kicked in our faces by bullies, and either quailed in fear or rose to the challenge. It is the amusement park venue on the beach in “The City that Never Sleeps!” How you can you beat that for quintessential American entertainment saturation?

Because no single entity was ever able to wrest full control of the scene, Coney Island remains remarkably underdeveloped. The self-interest of all parties claiming a stake and steadfastly clinging to it continues to save it from overdevelopment. In the same way, each visitor can stake out their own experience, from the toddler who derives his perfect entertainment from the Coney Island sand to the teenagers looking for love to the adult pedestrians wondering about life as a freak. It is not the main attraction of summer on the East Coast like it was a hundred years ago, but Coney Island remains a permanent carnival, by the beach, in New York City. Let’s repeat that; it bears repeating: Coney Island is a permanent carnival, by the beach, in New York City.

Coney Island serves as a grand microcosm for the American experience. The place was overrun by rabbits when Europeans arrived, became the epicenter of America’s burgeoning entertainment industry over the course of the next few hundred years, and remains a high-ranking hotbed of capitalist ideas both coming to life and being washed out to sea. Irony of ironies, it’s not even an island anymore, the creek separating it from mainland Brooklyn having been filled in decades ago for the construction of the Belt Parkway. Coney Island is a constantly evolving, contentious place, a mini-America, that encapsulates all of what we owe our kids in terms of intelligent breadth of experience.

If you are remotely inclined, pay it a visit for yourself. If nothing else, pay a visit for your kids so they can track their progress by Coney Island’s progress. It is a historical site the evolution of which is still in the making, and it seems perpetually will be. Although it most assuredly will still be there in some form when your children are grown, we know not what it will look like. So go sit there on Coney Island Beach with your kitchen spoons, found objects, and sand tools. Dig canals with your kids that guide the water spraying into the air from the metal palm tree. Put them on a kiddie ride, or twenty of them. Eat something tasty, unhealthy, and overpriced that still costs only half of what it would in a centralized, self-contained, air-conditioned venue where there’s no competition between vendors. And don’t forget to mention to them that there was a time, before Disney, before Xbox, before Barbie, before television, that this was the most famous beach in the world, visited by billions of people throughout its history. It will ALWAYS be here for us—as long as we keep coming back.