Seeking Academy Students!

The Nurturing Wisdom Academy is opening in just seven months!  

We could not be more excited! Our goal right now is to spread the word. Do you know any potential students, anyone else who might know a potential student, or anyone who might be interested in our mission? This includes parents, counselors or teachers at a school, a parent's group, or even potential teachers.  

Contact Amanda at 312-260-7945 ex. 5 with ideas or for more info! Help us spread the word to potential students - our plans are moving forward beautifully - all we need now are students to help!

Tutor Spotlight: Brandon Glover

Carol Dweck’s book Mindset lays out some interesting ideas about the way we perceive success and failure. She says that we can have either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. In a fixed mindset, when we fail at something, it means that we ourselves are failures. Clearly this idea is not conducive to learning and performing at a high level. In a growth mindset, however, failure is simply an opportunity to learn, grow, and be better in the future.

I’m tutoring a 9^th grader right now in executive functioning, incorporating Dweck’s Mindset principles. Since beginning work on the Mindset curriculum, my student has made great strides in preparing for tests, advocating for himself and asking for help from teachers and other students. He now knows that when he succeeds, he should celebrate his success and move on to the next challenge. When he fails, he knows now to dissociate himself from the failure so that he may objectively examine his mistakes and correct them in the future. After all, did Michael Jordan make every shot he took? Of course not! He had to fail in order to learn from his mistakes and correct them. 

Basketball has been a really great access point for my student to absorb the Mindset principles. He loves basketball, and his favorite team is the North Carolina Tar Heels. I asked if he thought he could get there, and though he replied yes, I could sense some doubt on his part. We then proceeded to draw a sort of goal tree. At the top of the tree was the goal of making the team at North Carolina. We then drew branches to show what he would need to do to get there: which skills and sub-skills he would have to develop both academically and athletically. Completing that exercise helped him break down a larger goal into more manageable tasks. It’s no longer a matter of being good enough to make the team – it’s about working as hard as possible to achieve a goal.

The Mindset curriculum is an excellent tool for students because it shows them that what they do wrong does not define them. They can change their opinions and propel themselves forward in school and in life if they equip themselves with the proper mindset.

Comprehension through Composition

Does your child's feedback from teachers sound anything like this?

• Needs to provide more detail in writing.
• Work on essay structure.
• Take more organized notes!
• Should write more coherent or complex sentences.
• Must work on staying focused and engaged while reading.

We work with many students who constantly get this type of feedback, but have no idea how to implement it. That's understandable! In a busy class with 25+ students, most students don’t get the one-on-one attention they need to become stronger readers and writers.

These skills are ideal to learn in a one-on-one setting. Sentence structure, for example, is a skill that may seem rather abstract. We know, however, that sentence structure can be systematically broken down and taught like a series of formulas. In fact, when writing is presented more like a pattern or a math equation, some students find it much easier to do.

In our popular Comprehension through Composition tutoring program, we help students develop a firm grasp on the toughest skills to learn in a classroom setting, such as organizing writing, developing advanced sentence structures, reading actively, and responding thoroughly to text. Comprehension through composition can be customized for students in grades three through twelve, and is available during the school year and in the summer. During the school year, we can incorporate a student's school writing assignments into tutoring.

Comp comp is one of the programs that our students love most. We've had students who have seen siblings working on comp comp with their tutor and requested it for themselves! Whether your child could use some supplemental enrichment or needs real skill-building, we would love to help. Contact us to learn more!

January Proctored Tests are coming up!

Join us for our next proctored test event! These tests are a fantastic opportunity for students to take a practice test in a real test environment. New students can take a diagnostic pre-test, and students currently working on a test prep program with us can take their mid- or post-teset.

Register Online Now!

pre-registration is required.

Winnetka & Hinsdale

Sat. January 28^th

8:45am

All the tests that we tutor  are available. It's an especially good time of year for:

ACT

SAT

SAT Subject Tests

Contact Lauren at 312-260-7945 ex. 112 with any questions.

"Why Gifted Students can be so Challenging," from The Washington Post

Gifted children are not always the kids who sit nicely in classrooms, study diligently for tests, and succeed easily in school.  Gifted kids often struggle with the structure of a typical school. 

We love this article from the Washington Post - Mark Philips discusses many of the symptoms of gifted children who are bored in school. At the NW Academy, opening next year, we hope to address many of the issues he discusses.

While talking with these students I realized that each of them could be described as creative dissident intellectuals, students with high intellectual and creative abilities who were difficult for teachers to handle.

The trouble they caused was not criminal but disruptive. This usually took one of two forms. One was active, such as sabotaging a class with sarcastic comments, or talking back continually to the teacher. Some, however, did it through relatively passive means, via sullen non-participation and/or other forms of quiet defiance. Not infrequently these students also were a challenge to their parents.

If they had lacked anything it was: (a) a supportive environment that engaged, encouraged and rewarded their spirits and their minds and (b) the skills to know how to effectively assert themselves. In schools and/or homes that they found discouraging, they didn’t know how to respond in an effective way to improve their situation.

Read the whole article here.