AARP Foundation Experience Corps Mentor Toolkit

As an Experience Corps (EC) volunteer, you play an important role in helping students achieve
success in the classroom. The time you spend tutoring is linked to improved literacy, reading,
and test scores. While impressive, the impact doesn’t have to stop there.
Did you also know that your tutoring time has built-in opportunities to help students
acquire and practice skills needed for “life” success? Taking just a few additional steps to get
to know your students, build a relationship, and add on short activities or questions during
your tutoring sessions can yield a number of additional benefits that go beyond—and even
enhance—academic achievement. During the time you spend helping students improve
reading, test scores, and literacy, you can also make a difference in children’s well-being,
relationships, and decision-making skills. In addition, your students also gain access to
positive role models and advocates that may be missing in their lives. The best part is that you
can support such benefits by being more intentional with behaviors you are probably already
doing or by simply adding any number of fun, interactive, and short questions or activities
outlined in this toolkit.

What’s Included

This toolkit contains nine tools that you can use to foster life success benefits in your students.
Inside you will find a variety of resources and supports to help you transform your tutoring
time. These include definitions, worksheets, activity ideas, and reflection questions. Each tool
is meant to give insight, focused skills, and ideas. Using them can help to transform your
tutoring sessions into a space that also offers support for long-term social and emotional
well-being in your students.