Award-Winning Tutors serving Murrieta, CA

In Math, the student and I worked on decimals, fractions, and percentages, as well as her current class subjects - negative number basics, and order of operations ("PEMDAS"). The student has little difficulty with homework - she rarely needs additional explanation and rarely makes errors. We also worked on a practice sheet that I made on decimals, fractions, and percentages, which proved more elusive, especially as concepts. Next week, I plan to focus on learning the concepts and then move to basic problems. I left her with the practice sheet and several word problems to try for next week. The student made the outline for an expository, personal essay using a useful acronym for organizing paragraphs with four core sentences (READ: Reason, Example, Anecdote, Detail). The topic of the essay was: explain to a girl moving to and from so and so, why her move is a good or bad thing. The student had no trouble coming up with positives about urban living. Sometimes, she needs prompting to focus her ideas, and to use specific ideas or details rather than abstractions. For next week, she is writing the essay from the outline she made in our session. We continue to keep a list of grammar rules and vocabulary in her class notebook. The student promised to send me her weekly blog post for ELA, and to bring a sheet from her class much like the READ one, that provides a structure for expository writing.

The student worked on his homework for class. He is continuing his lessons with mean, median, mode and range. Today, the homework problems consisted of the comparison between stem and leaf plots with histograms. I taught him the differences in the two representations as well as highlighting the things they have in common. He worked through his homework along with mini-lessons on the subject.

The student and I went through parametric equations and conic sections today. We did a few practice problems before working on some problems in his homework. Tomorrow he and I will be reviewing for his final exam and go over parametric equations, conic sections and graphing in polar coordinates. He is going to go through some problems tonight so that we can focus on what he is struggling with tomorrow.

We went through the student's unit review and the pre-test for the first half of the course. He has shown quite a lot of improvement in recent topics, and just needs a little refresher for some of the topics we haven't touched on in awhile.

We prepared for the student's exam. It included unit conversions with feet, inches, yards, pounds, ounces, minutes. We also studied fraction multiplication with an unknown and percentages, as well as word problems involving the prior. She struggles with simple operations like fraction multiplication. She had a hard time with unit conversion, so we drilled it multiple times until she got it down.

During this session, we focused on how to write a story using the seven elements of a story. We discussed character development and setting. I provided the student with a graphic organizer to help plan his stories. For homework, I asked him to use the graphic organizer to start another story.