Certified Tutors From Lesley University

Today, we reviewed logarithms and their properties. We discussed all the properties, worked on defining them in our own words, then did practice problems. The student caught on quickly and feels comfortable with logarithmic expressions.

The student and I worked on subtraction, focusing on double and triple digit numbers. In particular, she was struggling with concepts related to when numbers had zeroes in them (e.g. 504, 703, 410, 300). After some doing, she eventually was able to conceptualize how you can "borrow" from the next place over in order to do these sorts of problems.

The student and I worked on more AP practice problems today, pulling from previous topics ranging from evaluating limits to finding extrema to calculating rotational volume. The student took detailed notes to help herself remembers the older concepts, and she seemed to pick them back up quickly with my re-explanations.

We worked on integer operations today, focusing on add, subtract, multiply, and divide, as well as order of operations. The student does pretty well with this, but is a little rusty and needs to drill on it frequently to stay fresh. For homework, and asked him to ensure that his online account was linked to mine, so that I can track his progress and assign appropriate items for him to work on.

We went over the next chapter in his textbook, which would be the material for his next quiz. His homework and material are all about sequences and series, and whether or not they converge or diverge. We covered the difference between sequences and series, how to tell if a sequence converges and diverges, and were beginning to start on the methods of finding out whether a series converges and diverges. We got through the first section of his homework. We also discussed his last quiz. He seems to have some sort of test anxiety. We discussed maybe making his cheat sheet neater, as well as labeling the formulas and examples he wrote with words so they would be easier to find of the test, such as writing out the words "Integration By Parts" next to the formula.

Today the student and I focused our tutoring session on reviewing for a math test that she has tomorrow. Her math test focuses on the big theme of multiplication. She had review problem homework to use as review. We completed the different sections of this review homework. She had some sections already completed independently (multiplication properties and mental multiplication), and we checked over those together. We then completed the section on rounding and mental multiplication. When using rounding and mental math to multiply large numbers ending in zeros, she has some difficulty keeping track of how many zeros she had already used in her final product. Together, we came up with a "cross-off" method to verify that she has accurately used the correct amount of zeros in her final answer. She continued to use this method throughout the practice problems, and she was able to see the benefits. Next we completed the section on 2-digit by 2-digit multiplication. She was able to work through most of the problems completely independent using the "turtlehead" method of multiplication. The next section focused on exponents. Again, she did a nice job of organizing her work and accurately answering the problem questions asked. The final section contained two word problems. Because she could not highlight important information in her math book, we used a bullet point method to help extract the important information from each word problem. Today, as an organization strategy, I again modeled for her how to fold her math work paper into sections to keep her math work neat, tidy, and accurate. She liked this method, and chose to try it on her own on her second piece of math work paper. We ended the session by using playing cards to model different types of exponents. She completed all practice with 100% accuracy. To help the student see her learning and strategies that have helped her feel success in this unit, I wrote up a few reminders to "rock the test" for her to refer to before she goes into the test. She stated that she feels confident and ready to take her math test tomorrow.