Newsletter – Let it Snow – January 23, 2026

When should your child graduate from one-on-one tutoring at Book Bums?

That’s a good question, and we’ve not done a great job of communicating what it should look like.

We typically serve kids between the ages of five and ten years old. Of course, the reading demands for a five-year-old are not the same as a ten-year-old; but the fact remains that kids, no matter the age, must be equipped to decode the words on the pages of the books they’re required to read. That just makes sense. But what about those kids heading into second grade or higher?

Generally, young scholars must finish every lesson through Foundations 4.5 to be able to accurately decode most every word on the pages of books they’re going to read in their classrooms and beyond. That’s the bare minimum requirement for kids in first grade to be released from tutoring.

There are more lessons that all older students must learn so they can read and spell even more sophisticated words.

Additionally, we really want the opportunity to read a beginning chapter book with all our students. We want to ensure they’re applying what we’ve taught them as they read text with very few picture clues so we can ensure students are not guessing what the words could say but instead they are decoding the words to gain access to their meanings.

When a student has an error when reading to the tutor, the tutor can say, “Oh, wait. Do you remember when I taught you how to add -ing to words? Yeah? Check back on that word again. Does it say hopping or does it say hoping, and how do you know for sure?” The student will state back what she knows about how those words work and say, “So, that says hoping. I know because . . .”

After our students have finished all of the phonics-focused Foundations for Literacy lessons and we’re sure they’re leaning into what they now know about how words work as they read and spell, we also love to walk our students through a more sophisticated chapter book and work with them to ensure they can successfully navigate the kinds of questions they are often confronted with on nationally normed assessments.

Though few students have comprehension issues once they learn the phonics lessons, many students continue into another chapter book and work through our Comprehension Workshop lessons that help kids recognize and do what is required to understand the texts as we read them.

Sometimes we have students who struggle with writing well. For those students we can walk them through a nonfiction writing project.

The time and money you’re committing to positively impact your kids’ academic futures is significant, it’s true; but your dedication to helping your children will positively impact your family for generations.

We have some families who stay with us for all the programming we can offer because they’re just so excited to see their children thrive academically. We also have some families who receive word from their kids’ teachers that they’re really improving, so they just drop out of tutoring without completing the progression of lessons. Too often, those kids come back to tutoring because they still cannot access all the words on the pages of the books they long to read. We want to prevent students from leaving prematurely only to have to return at a later date.

We’ll be implementing an exit strategy for our students so we’re sure our kids are truly ready for release. It’s not that we don’t want our former students back. It’s that we don’t want them to need to come back to us.

Dropping out before finishing our programming is never something we recommend—not because we are money hungry, but because the beneficial impact from tutoring at Book Bums, when done to completion, should last forever.