Award-Winning ISEE Tutors serving Cambridge

The student worked on verbal reasoning and reading comprehension. I have suggested that she read more, write down the unfamiliar words, then look up the definitions. Her reading comprehension is good. I left her several lower level practice sections as well as one full length exam.

Today we continued working on fractions, decimals, and percents. The student seems to be making progress in this area, but is still having a hard time keeping the concepts straight and understanding how they relate to each other. She has been doing better when we focus on specific rules (i.e. move the decimal 2 places) as opposed to bigger concepts (i.e. tenths as a fraction is the same as the tenths place in a decimal). For next time, she will be shifting her focus back to the verbal section and doing a timed practice essay.

Today we went over the material that was remaining from the student's first full-length practice test. The student only missed 2 questions on the reading section of the test, and then she only missed 6 on the math achievement section, 3 being only because she did not bubble anything. Then we went over some new vocabulary on a practice verbal passage. After that, we began to explore math concepts that the student has not learned in school yet, but may be on the test. We completed a lesson on graphing points, and then we reviewed perimeter and area for various polygons. The student has her homework written down on a pink sticky note, and she is also going to start working in her Greek and Latin book next week. The student did a great job today; the focus and concentration yielded an effective session.

Today we covered mixed word problems, identified the meanings of roots in key vocabulary words, and worked extensively to identify the tone, mood, and figurative language devices in several pieces of writing. The student received additional word problem practice which included simple algebra problems. She is also tasked with writing a short answer to respond to the question "What is your favorite hobby? Provide details and descriptions to support your answer."

This session we looked at the sentence completion section of the test prep manual. We talked specifically about looking for clues and identifying words to see if they were positive or negative. Then, she completed some practice drills to test this skill. I asked her to pay very close attention to the clues in the sentence and underline them when she identifies them. She did very well on this exercise. Then, we did a bit of math practice and introduced the concept of order of operations to her.

Today I reviewed the reading comprehension and math sections of the student's practice test, ISEE lower level. She did great on the reading comprehension with only 4 incorrect. Quite a few math problems, as in the QR section, were not familiar to her. I explained the coordinate plane with (x,y), finding the width of a rectangle when knowing the area, finding the missing number in an equation, and finding a third of something. We will continue to concentrate on math during our next sessions. Her essay was very good for her age. I assigned her another topic for an essay to do during the week. She did well!