English for Kids tutors, lessons & classes

Most parents who write to us about English-for-kids lessons fall into one of two situations. Some are bilingual families living in an English-speaking country, where the parents speak another language at home and the child needs extra English support: sometimes for school, sometimes because the school's ESL pull-out isn't moving fast enough, sometimes because a parent worries their own accent or grammar is rubbing off in ways the child will have to unlearn later. Other families are abroad, with a child attending an international school where the medium of instruction is English, and they want a dedicated tutor to close the gap between classroom English and the level the school actually expects. Both situations call for the same thing: an experienced kids' English tutor who can meet the child where they are and build the missing pieces patiently, week after week.

The Strommen English-for-Kids roster filters for that exact profile. We're a curated boutique, so Garrett or someone on the team has met every tutor here, in person or via a thorough video interview. We screen for English fluency, of course, but the harder filter is the kids piece: classroom experience, patience, the ability to keep a six-year-old engaged for 25 minutes, the instinct to spot when a child is faking comprehension versus actually following along. Many of our kids' English tutors hold TESOL or TEFL credentials. Several are former elementary classroom teachers. A handful have backgrounds as reading specialists or literacy interventionists. The credentialing is real, but the chemistry with your child matters at least as much, and the trial lesson exists to surface that fit.

Lessons calibrate to your child's age, not a one-size pre-K-through-middle-school curriculum. For ages 4-5, sessions stay short (15-25 minutes), heavy on phonics fundamentals, songs, picture books, and vocabulary built through play. Tutors lean on Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, classic nursery rhymes, and song-based phonics programs that teach letter sounds without the child feeling like they're studying. For ages 6-9 the work shifts toward reading fluency and the leap from decoding to comprehension. Sight words get drilled into automaticity, early grammar concepts (subject-verb agreement, regular and irregular plurals, past tense) get introduced through context rather than rules, and spoken confidence gets built through structured conversation games. Reading aloud with the tutor every session is non-negotiable at this age. For ages 10-12 the curriculum moves toward writing structure (paragraphs, topic sentences, transition words) alongside richer comprehension passages, more abstract vocabulary, and the kind of analytical reading that middle school will demand. For ages 12-14 sessions look more like adult lessons but still scaffolded: academic register, essay structure, standardized test prep when relevant, age-appropriate literature and journalism. The thread across all ages is that lessons are taught by someone who actually likes working with children, not someone who teaches adults and tolerates the occasional kid.

Reading and literacy deserve their own paragraph because they are the highest-leverage piece of kids' English instruction and the place ESL pull-out programs most often fall short. A child who decodes well, recognizes sight words automatically, and reads independently for pleasure will outpace classroom peers within a year. A child who's still sounding out words in third grade will struggle in every subject because every subject is taught in English. Our literacy-focused tutors use phonics-based curricula (Reading A-Z, Bob Books, Fountas and Pinnell guided reading levels, Orton-Gillingham techniques where dyslexia is suspected) paired with daily reading practice your child does between sessions. Paired reading (the tutor reads a sentence, the child reads it back, then the child reads independently with the tutor catching errors gently) is one of the most effective techniques for emerging readers and shows up in most of our kids' English sessions in some form. A focused tutor working one-on-one for 30 minutes a week, plus 10 minutes of daily home reading the tutor assigns, will move a kid forward faster than three hours a week of group ESL.

A few questions almost every parent asks in the first conversation are worth answering up front. Will my child get confused growing up with two languages? No. Decades of research, with Ellen Bialystok's work on bilingual children at York University as the most-cited example, shows that bilingual kids develop typically on every measure that matters and often display advantages in executive function, attention switching, and metalinguistic awareness. Mixing words from two languages within a single sentence (code-switching) is normal, healthy, and not a sign of confusion; bilingual adults do it too. Our blog post on how the brain benefits from being bilingual covers the research in more depth. Should I speak only English at home so my child improves faster? Almost never. The home language is your child's foundation for identity, family connection, and grandparent relationships, and abandoning it usually backfires within a generation. The right move is to invest seriously in school English (which is what tutoring is for) while keeping the home language strong. Should we try to erase my child's accent? No. Accents shift naturally as children pick up the dominant speech around them, and a tutor's job isn't to drill a child out of how they sound. Clarity matters; uniformity doesn't.

For parents abroad whose kids attend international or English-medium schools, the curriculum looks a little different. These children typically have good classroom English vocabulary but uneven exposure to colloquial spoken English, idiom, and informal register. They can pass an academic English assessment but stall in a conversation with a native-speaking classmate's parent. Our tutors who specialize in this profile lean heavily on conversation practice, age-appropriate idiom (the 70 most useful ones, not all 70 in our proverbs post), and exposure to current kid-and-teen culture in English-speaking countries: the YouTubers, shows, sports, music your child's American or British peers are actually consuming. The blog post on English greetings covers the social-register layer that classroom English usually skips.

Between lessons, the parent's role is to curate the English environment without turning it into a chore. For younger kids: read aloud in English every night, even if you're not a native speaker. Your child will read along, follow pictures, and absorb rhythm and vocabulary. For mid-elementary: shows in English with English subtitles (Bluey, Magic School Bus, Wild Kratts, classic Disney) plus 20 minutes of independent reading. For older kids: longer-form content they actually want (YouTube channels, podcasts, age-appropriate films), plus an English-language book they're reading for pleasure, not for school. Audiobooks count and are particularly useful for kids who struggle with the decoding-to-comprehension leap. The tutor will assign specific between-session reading or listening that fits your child's level; your job is to make space for it in the week.

For children with diagnosed learning differences (dyslexia, ADHD, processing speed) or suspected ones, mention this upfront in the trial. We have tutors with specific training in literacy interventions and special-needs experience; our English for special needs students page covers that profile more fully. For California families specifically, the state's Self-Determination Program can sometimes fund language tutoring for kids with IEPs; our SDP guide walks through eligibility. We're happy to be part of the support team your child already has.

Lessons are one-on-one. The tutor builds the curriculum around your child's level, your family's schedule, your child's interests, and your specific goal, whether that's reading-readiness for kindergarten, fluency catch-up for an immigrant child in second grade, international school support abroad, or middle-school writing prep. The 30-minute trial is free and includes a parent conversation up front. For broader context, our ESL course page covers the family of related programs and our conversational English and Business English specialty pages cover related profiles for adults in the family. Or browse the full tutor list and book a trial directly. Most parents notice the shift around lesson eight or nine. The kid stops dreading Tuesday, starts reading the picture book aloud without being asked, corrects a sibling's grammar at dinner. The hour a week was doing its work the whole time; you just couldn't see it accumulating until it spilled into the rest of the day.