Hallmark, move over: A tutor says goodbye by greeting card

Some of the people who volunteered as tutors this year became pretty attached to the children they helped learn to read.

Take Lisa Mach. An engineer for the Port of Seattle, she tutored a first-grader named John at Seattle’s Martin Luther King Elementary School, speaking to him every week by phone from her desk at work, going over his lessons for a half an hour as each looked his reading assignment on their respective computer screens.

When it came time to meet John in person at an end-of-the-year party for tutors and students, however, Lisa had to be out of town. She felt badly about missing the chance. So she composed a card for John to be delivered in her stead.

She put a picture of herself on the cover. On the inside, she listed  a dozen suggested “Summer Books After First Grade” and wrote a message:

Hi John,

I can’t be there to visit you at school today because I am on a trip visiting my baby grandson.

I sent this card to tell you what a really GOOD reader you are. I liked that you sounded out every single word until you knew what it was. I also liked that you used your voice and gave the words feeling. If the story was fun, you made it sound happy. When a boy or a girl was scared, you made it sound a little scary. Soon you can read longer stories about people and their adventures.

I hope you can visit the library during the summer and get books to read so you will be a strong reader when you go back to school for second grade.

Have a fun summer!

Lisa

“I am really glad the card worked, though I sure would rather be there to meet him in person,” Lisa said last week in an email. “This is my first time with TutorMate. I have a small sense of what it might be like for teachers to say goodbye to their little ones at the end of each year.”