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Tutoring Time

Tree House volunteers and Junior Staff Members provide free homework help for school-age children four afternoons a week, Tuesday to Friday, from 3:00-5:00 p.m.

Tutoring Time is our after-school program that provides steady muscle for building community transformers.  Tutoring Time mentors partner with children, ages 5-17, to help them find their identity, voice, and power through education, reading, and the arts.

At the start of each Tutoring Time session, our participants read the “Tree House Books Pledge” out loud together:

I choose:

…to be a reader, writer, and thinker. 

…to be a valuable part of my community and the Tree House Books family.

…to treat others how I want to be treated.

…to respect my friends, family, and neighbors.

…to respect myself.

…to never give up on my education.

…to live honestly, nonviolently, and honorably.

…to be a team player.

…to take responsibility for my future.

What does the Tree House Books Pledge look like in action?

Every afternoon, the Tree House kids sign in, get paired up with a tutoring mentor, and begin their homework.

When homework is completed, it is time for our Life With Books (LWB) initiative.  LWB is rooted in these core values:

  1. Engagement.  Kids reading books—staying in it, awake, and exploring.
  2. Enhancement.  Working to improve proficiency.
  3. Identity. We want children to grow to see themselves as readers, writers, and thinkers.  Their identity—their preferences, ideas, and dreams—will be strengthened through building their relationship with books and the Tree House community.

Other Tutoring Time activities include tending our back-lot garden, writing projects, art experiments, and visits from Artists-In-Residence.  Twice a month, we host African-American professionals who are excellent in their fields; kids get to ask questions and more fully explore their own big question: “What do I want to be when I grow up?”

Tutoring Time concludes with a healthy, substantial snack, provided by our partners at Nutritional Development Services.  Children and mentors pull all of the tutoring tables together into one long table, and we each have a turn sharing “One Good Thing/One Bad Thing” about our day.

“In my own words, Tree House Books is a place young children and young adults come to seek help from older and more experienced adults. They help young children and young adults with homework or just maybe even something to talk about.”
—Nyseem, age 14, Junior Staff Member