First, it is important to develop trust and rapport from the start - wait until you and your tutee are comfortable with each other before you try to informally assess his difficulties and find compensatory strategies.
Learning disabilities are not constant or consistent. Therefore, you will need to be able to constantly watch, adapt, revise, assess, and ask questions. What might work one day is not guaranteed to be the best approach the next.
Give your tutee constant feedback and opportunities to employ the strategies you taught in your tutorials.
You have an advantage that classroom teachers don't have; you can get the student used to reading aloud to you. Something that might be humiliating to a student in a classroom might be easier if you have set up your tutorials as a "safe" place. The student can then practice reading outloud.
Often, you cannot use the same strategies you use to teach yourself something. Rather, an explanation that seems very clear to you may seem incomprehensible to your tutee. Your sense of "internal logic" may simply not work with the way he thinks, and so your explanations won't be helpful, only frustrating. For instance, "telling" is usually the worst learning tool a tutor can use. Instead of relying on one kind of explanation, you will need to be flexible and adapt, and have available several different ways of explaining a strategy. We need to:
- acquire an understanding of various strategies available
- decide which might be the best for this student and this activity
- break down learning process into bite sized chunks
- decide which are the most important steps
- decide which order they should be in
- be able to explain the relation of each step
- be able to explain the purpose of the strategy