Certified Tutors From Indiana University-Purdue University-Fort Wayne

During our session today, the student and I continued to work together on her English coursework. We continued to analyze similes and metaphors from the two Robert Frost poem selections offered in her textbook, and discussed the concept of loneliness while learning a new vocab word ("Iconoclast"). We moved forward to discuss a presentation that she has been working on, an interpretation of D.H. Lawrence's poem "The Piano", and talked about the themes within the poem. I also introduced the concepts of synecdoche and metonymy to her, and we analyzed the way that synecdoche fit into the poem. For our next session, she is going to continue working on her presentation, so that we can edit and analyze her progress.

The student worked on sight words - reading and writing. He also put together the numbers puzzle up to 20 and we did counting, addition, and subtraction with the colored eggs. I gave him three pages of "homework" to do before our next session.

The student and I went over factoring and standard and vertex forms of quadratics in detail. He is very good at vertex form and can reliably do these problems by himself. He has more trouble with factoring. We will keep working on factoring; it is the kind of skill that is not easy without a significant amount of practice. I'm very pleased to hear about his score on his last test!

The student and I worked on some spelling, reading comprehension, and math. He has become a much better speller than when I first worked with him. He is spelling more advanced words properly and passing his spelling tests much quicker. His reading comprehension is also greatly improved. He is not only able to understand main ideas much better but also is better at locating and remembering specific details. With his math, we just focused on using the operations and applying them with word problems. He seems to be very adept at it, and I will have to find him harder math for him to work on.

We continued our work with random variables today, primarily through working out problems. The student was able to complete her homework as well as go over a sample problem from her upcoming test that her teacher had given her. She and I both saw definite improvement in her ability to understand and work through random variable problems. She's more easily identifying the correct formula to use in each situation and then recalling that formula, and she also has a better grasp on the theoretical background of these concepts. Great progress!

Today our focus was on science. The objectives included organisms and environments, predator vs prey relationships, abiotic vs biotic elements in an ecosystem, the relationship between the Sun, Earth, and Moon, the theory of tectonic plates, and topography maps. We did an overview of each objective. Afterwards, we worked on problems dealing with topography and reading maps.