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Today was a bit of an introductory session with the student because on her info page it says that she is in 12th grade, so I assumed she had already taken the SAT and knew which sections she struggled with; however, she is in 11th grade and was not familiar with the SAT format yet.  So instead of going straight to sections that she knew were challenging for her, we skipped around in the SAT prep book and worked through sample problems together.  Ideally, I would like to get a bit more done during a session, so I assigned her a practice test to do before our session on Thursday.  The next session should undoubtedly be more productive once I know what she needs help studying.

Student 1 had a much better attitude this evening and made a lot of progress with the letter c. He continues to make comments that demonstrate confusion with the direction of letters, though.  We will continue to improve his accuracy with routine practice. Student 2 had great success with spelling words that use the doubles final consonant rule. He was able to use his knowledge of syllable types to understand the reason why to double the consonant or not.

The student and I focused quite a bit of attention on vocab. I reiterated the importance of retaining words by showing him how many words he would have gotten right on the vocab sections if he had only remembered the words we have been going over. All in all, though, he did quite well on the critical reading sections nevertheless. He is still having some trouble with certain types of questions, which we have been going over in detail. We did a section of Writing as practice, focusing on the sections we didn't get to on Saturday, and he did very well, as usual. At the end, we did a small amount of math practice, but focused only on the topics he had trouble with before.

We covered what will be on the student's test and how many minutes she has in each section. We covered math for an hour; I explained some concepts and taught her some tricks in order to answer a question faster and in a more proficient way. We also covered science for an hour, and during this hour I taught her how to avoid answering the most common wrong answers.

In this lesson the student and I focused exclusively on the Math section of the ACT. He took a HSPT Math section test from another test prep book and we discussed the answers he got wrong after he finished. He completed the test with eight questions left unanswered. We discussed how to do the problem solving questions primarily, and focused heavily on questions dealing with percents and interest rates. At the end of the lesson I assigned him a practice quiz that I created for homework before our next lesson.

During today's session, we worked on identifying themes and motifs in "The Remains of the Day" so as to ensure that the student would be well prepared for his upcoming essay. Since he had only just gotten a copy of the book, today was the first time we had discussed it in any significant depth. As such, the discussion stretched for most of the session. The themes we identified included dignity, tradition v. technology and change, and service. Motifs included science and biblical references. Over the course of our discussion, I had him identify and highlight important passages, and compose a list of the themes and motifs we discussed. His essay is due next Thursday, and so my thought was that it would be extremely helpful for him to have some kind of written record of our discussion to serve as a starting point for writing the essay. Of course, I will also work closely with him on the essay over the coming week.