Certified Tutors From Lake Tahoe Community College

We mostly did a review of the student's chemistry subjects, as she is getting ready for a big midterm. We came up with a few mnemonic devices to help her remember some of the polyatomic ions she was struggling with; otherwise she was quite solid on virtually everything we looked at. We also did a brief investigation of some math topics she was struggling to remember including algebraic symmetry tests and linear transformations, into which we will go in much greater depth on Wednesday.

We went over the student's assigned homework from school, more practice finding the perimeters and areas of triangles, squares, and rectangles. His homework also started on the concept of finding the area and circumference of circles. He really seems to be grasping all of these concepts and completed his homework with little help from me. After his assigned schoolwork, we worked through word problems that required the geometric concepts he's working on in school.

The student worked on his math, social studies, and spelling homework. I checked his work for accuracy. Then he read for 20 minutes.

This session was review and study. We went over a few practice problems out of previous tests. We also looked at some physics including orbits and gravitation, and worked out two problems in that subject. Overall, the student seems well prepared.

The student worked mainly on her math and language arts homework. For math the homework wanted her to work on understanding place values of a number. She understood most of the directions but struggled with understanding why "eighty six" isn't 806. I suggest (and in our next session I can reinforce) teaching her the concept of the tens place value. In language arts we worked on contractions, spelling and compound words. She excelled at contractions and I really liked how enthusiastic she was to write down the spelling words (even when it wasn't necessary). In language arts I hope to work more in depth in spelling and I hope to come back to her reading and see how she's improved.

We started with a page from the student's algebra workbook that had 3 distinct parts: 1) Common factoring methods (Difference of Squares, "Freshman's Dream," Difference of Cubes, Sum of Cubes), 2) The factoring of assorted other quadratics, and 3) Division of polynomials. For each of these parts, he was keen on fighting with the techniques over and over until he'd attained some degree of comfort. After the worksheet, we looked at a few problems from his upcoming homework involving inequalities for a system of equations, and we finished with applications (word problems) for that concept. We are loosely scheduled to meet next Wednesday, but the specifics haven't been cemented.