Certified Tutors From CUNY Lehman College

Today was another successful session with the student. First, he told me that he received an A on a quiz he took the day after we met last week, and he was very happy about this. This is a great sign that he just needs a bit more focused guidance each week in order to better understand the material and get better grades in the class. This afternoon, we started by reviewing his most recent class material and homework assignment, which focused on finding the areas of parallelograms and triangles. After he learned the formulas, he did well with this. In order to complete these problems, I also helped him relearn SOHCAHTOA and how to use trig functions to find the missing side of a triangle. After we finished this material, we started reviewing his homework for tomorrow night so that he gets ahead in the class and understands the upcoming material. This dealt with finding the area of trapezoids, rhombi, and kites. As long as he reviews the formulas a few more times, I'm positive that he will do great on his upcoming quiz on this material!

The student and I played a game that required her to identify letters, their sound and a word that starts with that letter. She practiced writing letters and saying their sounds. We made CVC words with letters and she practiced reading them. She also practiced writing letters and words on the iPad. She was a pleasure to work with and very enthusiastic.

For this session, the student and I focused on her trigonometric concepts. She mentioned that at the start of the semester, her teacher started the students working on trigonometry. She mentioned that she had no idea what she was working on despite her having numerous notes. She mentioned that she only has one hour with her teacher and that there's really no one on one time. We began by learning the basic trig functions, sine, cosine, and tangent as well as their reciprocals, cosecant, secant and cotangent. I had her repeat the definitions of each as well as writing them down to ensure that she knew the difference between each. We then focused on her next lesson which was graphing the different functions using the unit circle. We spent about ten minutes learning the unit circle and how each trig function correlates to the circle and its corresponding graph. We then focused on doing practice problems identifying each graph and how they're derived. She was very receptive to learning the concepts and by the end of the session was much more confident on understanding the functions and their graphs. At the end of the session, her mother and I agreed to meet three times a week to ensure that the student is fully understanding the material.

We reviewed for the student's test coming up tomorrow. We covered how to distinguish linear and nonlinear functions, how to graph inequalities, how to use the point-slope formula, and the slope formula. We also covered domain and range comprehensively and that was one of the trickier concepts for him. He understands how to do those problems now. He is pretty well prepared for the test if he remembers everything we covered today.

This session we focused on reviewing for the student's upcoming exam which covers exponential and logarithmic function as well as the related interest and radioactive decay formulas. We spent a good deal of time focusing specifically on finding the domain of and how to solve logarithmic equations algebraically. Besides that, significant progress was made in some of the more involved uses of the interest and decay formulas, such as calculating initial investments and interest rates.

We worked on a review of the student's section on conics. We focused on graphing, vertices, foci, directrix lines ,and standard form for parabolas and ellipses. By the end of our session, he understood the material.