Seton Home Study School – Do You Offer Daily Tutoring?

What services do Seton counselors provide? Can they do daily tutoring?

While we want to answer questions from students and parents, daily tutoring is beyond the scope of what counselors can provide.

Counselors can provide general help for students who are struggling. Counselors can explain difficult concepts, or explain why a student missed a question on a test, or talk to parents about the best way to teach a subject.

While there is no firm time limit to how much help counselors can give, when it is clear to a counselor that a student needs extensive help, the counselor will suggest that the student should seek more individualized instruction.

Seton has set our prices as low as possible since we know that most homeschooling families have a single income. If we were to provide extensive tutoring for students, we would need to substantially increase the cost to enroll.

Besides counseling, Seton provides many helps for students. For example, courses often have additional materials, such as online audio or video lessons.

For Saxon math courses, there are CD-ROMs available which go over every lesson in the books. These interactive video supplements are like having a math tutor present during each lesson found in the Saxon text. For other courses, we often have supplemental workbooks which can be purchased through Seton Educational Media (www.setonbooks.com).

When a tutor is needed, we suggest first seeing if a family member or friend might fill the need. If not, perhaps there is a retired teacher or college student at your parish who could help. If those resources are not available, then there are many tutoring sites online, such as tutor.com. These sites usually allow families to buy as little as an hour of tutoring at a time, at a reasonable price.

Which test should I take in high school if I intend to go to a college?

Most colleges accept the SAT test and the ACT test. If you have a specific college in mind, you could email or phone their admissions department and ask if they have a preference of one test over the other.

If the college doesn’t care, then the best way for you to decide which to choose is take an SAT and ACT practice test online. If you do better on one than the other, or just prefer the format of one over the other, then choose the one with which you are most comfortable.

Many Christian and Catholic colleges are now accepting a new college-entrance test called the Classic Learning Test as an alternative to the ACT and SAT. Most of Seton’s college partners accept this test. It can be found at www.cltexam.com.

My friend is not home schooling with Seton, but can she still order your standardized tests?

Seton Testing offers tests to all families, not just those enrolled with Seton. We offer a variety of tests so your friend should research what might be the best test for her student.

She can visit the Seton Testing website at www.setontesting.com/test-comparison-charts/ and view the test comparison chart where she can receive information or order the CAT, TerraNova 2, and Iowa tests or call one of our Testing Consultants at 800-542-1066. The Stanford 10 is available online for students in grades 3-12.

My friend wants to enroll, but she wants to grade her child’s tests. Can Seton provide answers for the tests?

Seton provides answers for the daily work, parent-graded quizzes, and some other assignments. However, Seton does not provide answers for quarterly tests, book reports, and some compositions which need to be submitted to the school for grading. The Seton report card reflects the average grades from the parents and Seton.

When we send grades or high school transcripts to other institutions, the receiving schools must feel confident in the integrity of the grades. If we were to give out the answers to the Seton-graded materials, then it could severely reduce that confidence in transcripts from Seton.

We understand that some families want to do their own grading and record-keeping so as to have more control over their children’s education. We firmly believe that parents are the primary educators of their children, so we have no problem with parents making that decision.

In such a case, parents could still receive all the other services which Seton offers; plus, we will grade any normally Seton-graded item which such a parent sends to us. However, Seton would not be able to send out grades or transcripts for families who do their own grading; parents would need to do that themselves.

Has Seton produced a Seton Math text-workbook for Grade 5 or 6?

Seton’s 5th grade math text-workbook is now available. A Seton 6th grade math text-workbook is in development. Keep this project in your prayers.

For 7th grade, while we will not produce a text-workbook for this grade, we are developing a workbook with practice math problems, specifically for the 7th grade Saxon book, lesson by lesson.

Sometimes I get discouraged and pray for a better attitude for myself. Do you have any other ideas?

Prayer is essential for success in everything we do. I would encourage you to have your children pray along with you, not only at certain times of the day, morning and noon and evening, but also at those difficult moments as they occur. Those moments of discouragement are a great opportunity for grace. Your children, too, need to learn to pray at difficult times.

When children seem frustrated with studying their lessons, writing a book report, or taking a test, teach them to pray to his or her guardian angel. Alternatively, teach them to pray to a favorite saint, the saint of the day, or the special saint after whom your child was named. God works miracles, and we can see them every day in the words and actions of our children.

You might also look at all you’ve actually accomplished, because you may find it’s more than you think. It’s easy to get bogged down every day in what you have or have not done. But education is about a lifetime, not just whether you finished everything you planned on a certain afternoon.

We hear from parents who say they wish they could get more done; and we hear from parents who tell us their students scored very high on the SAT or just graduated from college summa cum laude. These are sometimes the same parents.

What you are doing now may well lead to a well-educated practicing Catholic in the future, even if you feel you aren’t accomplishing as much as you would like.

Do you have any materials for me to help my child with dyslexia?

Our Special Services Department offers two highly effective programs which teach literacy skills to children with dyslexia. The Stevenson Language Program uses multisensory techniques and visual mnemonics to help children better retain the skills they are learning. With this program, parents teach their children directly.

The other program we offer is the Dyslexia Training Program. This is a video program which Seton was given permission to reproduce for our students. There are 336 DVD lessons, though historically, many parents have found that completing the first 150 lessons is all that was necessary.

For more information about either program, please contact the Special Services Department at ssdept@setonhome.org or 540-622-5576. We also have several online presentations on Learning Styles, which you can access via your My Seton page.