Certified Tutors From Sacred Heart University

The student and I had a good tutoring session tonight and got through the materials for both the Spanish and Bio test, as well as an upcoming Spanish quiz. He had created study-sheets for these assignments, which was awesome to see! We also mapped out a plan for his finals prep, including a timeline for his essay. He showed great initiative today and I'm looking forward to seeing him again.

We read his World History homework together and he filled in his homework study guide. We talked about each section so I knew he understood the material. He was very engaged. It was a pleasure working with him.

This session focused on reading. We read various fiction books aimed at working on decoding and comprehension skills. After reading, the student practiced retelling and discussing the characters in the text. All in all, he did very well with the retelling, but still needs to work on including actual character names in the retelling, versus using pronouns. This is a skill that we will continue to work on during our next session. I left some books for him to practice with until then.

The student has a test on proportional relationships next week so we went over his practice test to make sure he could do all of the different ways of solving proportions (complex fractions, dimensional analysis, etc.). We also spent some time graphing proportional relationships, learning they must pass through the origin (numbered point 0,0) in order for it to be a proportion.

The student and I started by reviewing the concept which his calculus instructor just introduced the previous day: linearization. I introduced a brief lesson on the topic, breaking it down for him in simpler, less complex terminology. I modeled two examples and then had him complete two guided practice examples. He aced the solution to both examples. He said he wished for me to introduce the topic which he would next be taught in his calculus class, optimization. I explained how optimization works, the purposes behind it and the steps to successfully solve an optimization problem. I modeled two optimization problems, which he completed on his own.

We worked on a project for math class in which the student drew a shape then performed various translations and reflections on a graph. Later, we reviewed his homework problems which focused on scale factor. The lesson was especially interested in how perimeter and area of dilations were affected by scale factor. At the end, we reviewed algebraic concepts of multiplication such as isolating variables with division.