Award-Winning Private SAT Writing and Language Tutoring in Mission Viejo, CA

As always, the student has a great command of math and is a pleasure to work with. He obviously had put a lot of work into this before we met, and this hastened his learning while we were together! We went through the problems that were on the second email.

At this point, all the student really needs is practice and repetition before her exam. She has a solid foundation in all the subjects and knows the basics well. Today, we did some more practice problems in all of the subjects and I gave her a few last-minute tips for test-taking. We talked about how she should go about answering questions in the more efficient way as she did them. We will meet one more time and just do a variety of problems to hopefully provide a review for the entire test. She seems prepared and just needs to keep practicing so that all of the concepts and problem types remain fresh in her memory.

During our session today, the student and I reviewed the English and math portions of the ACT. We reviewed many grammar rules including passive and active voice, indirect and direct subjects, and usage of him/ her vs. she/ he, among others. We also went over useful test-taking strategies and concepts of the ACT math portion. His homework is to complete a full practice test from his ACT prep book, and also to complete the full online ACT practice test I had sent him. He also should review all of the questions he had missed from the book practice test, just like we have been doing in session.

The student and I had a nice session, and she was a bit more focused as we went through a number of basic words and sentences and played a game of "find the word." She continues to make progress.

We started with reading and fluency tonight. The student did a timed phrase reading and read 63 phrases in 1 minute, which is her best time yet! I also had her read a passage 3 times for 1 minute. She started with 104 words, then read 122 words, and ended with 125 words. Then I had her read the next section of the "Fairies" book. I explained how to find different examples of cause (why something happened) and effect (what happened), then had the student try to find a few examples on her own. She did very well with identifying different examples in the text. For math, I brought coins as a visual reference for her. I asked her how many quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies were in a dollar and she pulled out the correct number of coins to show a dollar. Then I had her identify different fractions of a dollar. She is still having trouble with the part/whole relationship, but she explained that having the actual coins helped her figure it out.

Worked on the student's essay and reading. We have moved on to the new essay and she is having trouble transitioning. We will work further on this in future sessions. With the reading, she is falling for the tricks. She hasn't yet learned to not trust the questions, but she will. We will focus on this aspect more next session.