Certified Tutors From Southwest Virginia Community College

The student has a math test tomorrow. He brought his review packet that we went over together. I had him complete as much as he could on his own, and I only came in when he had questions. He was able to complete most of the review on his own. He is pretty solid on finding the slope using the slope formula and manipulating the point-slope formula or the slope-intercept formula. He can also graph these equations fairly well. He was pretty good on factoring and solving for quadratics. He had a few questions on how to find the domain of certain equations, but after some review, he did fine. He has to keep practicing finding the domain of rational and radical expressions. I created a few problem sets for him to finish, and he did well. As long as he maintains focus, he will do fine. He will start his final review next week, so we will go into more in depth, full cumulative review.

I covered graphing linear equations using:1) Slope and Y-intercept, 2)X and Y-intercepts. I also covered calculating the slope of a line passing through two given points.

As part of the student's lesson 20 review, she received a take-home packet to complete which included different math questions for calculating the area of specific shapes within other geometric figures. Some of these included circles within circles, semi circles within circles, circles within squares, triangles within rectangles, etc. We completed the majority of the packet during the tutoring session, serving as a good review of the lesson concepts.

The student and I went over two specific methods of solving quadratic equations, using the quadratic formula and completing the square. I wrote out for him some general steps and instructions, which is how he typically learns best, I have found. He said he was understanding much better afterwards. We also went over square roots.

We reviewed the amplitude and periods of the sine and cosine functions, as well as the domain and ranges. The student did great!

Yesterday's math session went pretty well. The student has already gotten better at solving equations since last week. He can mostly solve basic equations on his own that involve addition and multiplication. He still occasionally makes mistakes adding and multiplying negative numbers, but he is getting much better at that. Being able to use negative numbers is crucial for algebra, so it's encouraging that he is starting to get the hang of it. The other skills that we are working on are using distributive multiplication, and simplifying expressions.