Award-Winning English Grammar and Syntax Tutors serving Westminster

In this session, the student completed a diagnostic quiz to test his retention of grammatical concepts we have covered so far. I will be looking at the results of this quiz to determine his progress and what concepts need to be reviewed. I have not finished analyzing his responses yet, but so far he has demonstrated excellent retention of grammatical knowledge.

We worked again in the student's language arts workbook, this time on pronouns and prepositions. We finished the section on nouns, pronouns, and prepositions and she completed about half of the review exercises for that section of the book. We spent about half an hour on basic math skills, especially addition tables and multiplication tables. Focus continues to be an important goal for this student. She is very intelligent and quick to grasp concepts.

The student is studying complex sentences in his coursework this week, and also invasive species in language arts. I'm happy to report that he and I reviewed complex sentences long ago, so he was a pro at them in class and did great! We played a flashcard game with parts of speech and punctuation, and writing sentences implementing these concepts. He did a great job, but you can never review too much. One thing that was new this week was how to use a colon and semicolon, so we may cover that more in the next few weeks until it is cemented.

I went over the student's paper before the session and made edits. We then went over all of the grammatical edits. When an edit I made had the possibility of changing her original meaning, we discussed it together. When the meaning was unclear, I asked the student about the concept and how it related to her topic, we then used her explanation to come up with strong and clear sentences to illustrate her point.

The student is working on a new writing component of the SATs. We discussed last session and the new marking criteria. Then we explored an example question and how to deconstruct the passage, focusing on how the author uses strategies to support their article. The student was to write the first two paragraphs of an answer based on this. It was a productive session and the student was able to deconstruct the text.

The student and I worked on a poem about where he is from for his English class. His writing has become much less verbose and while he still struggles with that occasionally, his struggles are no worse than the average high school freshman. One thing I did notice that still needs work is his use of descriptive language. I have several exercises we can do in the coming weeks to improve on that.