Award-Winning Private SAT Math Tutoring in Connecticut

The student and I reviewed the math questions from her homework first. We went over a few mistakes she was able to correct on her own, practiced picking and choosing variables, and went over inequalities. Then we reviewed the reading and writing sections. Lastly we went over the essay. We talked about general strategies and then worked through an example prompt together. I tasked her with going over many of the potential prompts for added practice.

The student and I worked entirely on the Math section in our first session, so I wanted to at least cover some of the writing and reading sections before her test on the 2nd. She is a very perceptive reader and is an impressive analyzer of the text. She scored well on the section that we worked through in her newly bought SAT book. We finished by going through the writing section, as she struggled finding sentence errors. I showed her a repeatable process to answering those types of questions, starting with checking that nouns match up all the way down to adverbs.

Worked through a reading and writing section. Writing section needs more work, so focus will go to that from now on.

First, we went over the essay the student had written for homework. There was definite improvement in this essay, especially in his copious use of examples. I reminded him to use touchstone sentences at the end of every paragraph to remind his reader of his thesis. We briefly went over one math question that he had from the math section he had done, and then we spent the rest of the time in the writing section. He did very, very well with using his assigned vocabulary over the past week, so that should help him with remembering meanings in the future. I helped him put together his vocabulary list for the coming week, so that he may continue to use his vocabulary words in practice. Next, we went over questions on sentence structure and grammar, focusing particularly on parallel structures. He is getting much better at his pronoun substitution and generally does these questions correctly. We also went over sentence construction questions. He did much better at these than last week, but we will still continue to practice these types of questions. He is very enthusiastic about the tutoring process and works hard. He is a pleasure to work with.

We started with the writing section and began with punctuation (semi-colons, colons, etc.). After that, we spent a while on apostrophe errors and how to know whether the apostrophe goes before or after the s. If the word with the s is possessive and is an adjective modifying/describing a noun, then it needs an apostrophe. If that word would have an s even if it wasn't possessive (i.e., it is a plural noun ending in s), then the apostrophe goes after the s. However, "children" is already plural, so if "children" has an s, there is never a case where the apostrophe goes after the s. Then we went through how to find surface area of various 3D objects (slant height of a pyramid is not the same as the height!) and spent most of the rest of the time on percentages. When you say "8% of something," the "of" means that you MULTIPLY that something by .08. You can also use proportions (percent/100 = x/total). Either works. For converting to fractions, if you press the "math" button and then select >FRAC, the graphing calculator will convert a decimal into a fraction. I asked the student to bring in her calculator next time so we can go over how to most effectively use it on the test, and also go over how to solve the problems without the shortcuts on the calculator.

Today we went over assigned problems and looked at some questions dealing with algebra. The student was doing quite well with understanding harder questions. She seems to excel at multiple choice but cannot replicate such standards with the open ended problems and needs help getting started on a lot of them. We will study this more, until she understands entirely.