Award-Winning Private SSAT Tutoring in Rancho Cucamonga, CA

Today the student and I did a lot of math work to prep for her test tomorrow. I'm sure her reading score will be excellent and hopefully her verbal score will reflect all the hard work she's done learning new vocabulary. The math problems we went over were sometimes ones we'd done before, but with the exception of one problem, she could figure it out by herself when prompted. Hopefully with her test tomorrow she will stay focused and remember all that we've gone over these past few months. Best of luck!

Finished with review of the practice test. He did a great job on the math questions and verbal. He needs to just take his time on the questions as he does have the knowledge to score well on the test. I told him not to over-analyze the questions in regard to reading comprehension. We discussed not doing this and making sure he has an answer to the question after reading the question and before he reads the answers to make sure he is not thrown off the correct answer. He has the ability to correctly answer all the math questions as well as the vocabulary. We discussed methods of answering the analogies and excluding the obvious incorrect answers.

Today we focused on the reading section for an hour and the verbal section for the final half hour. We worked on simplifying complex passages by breaking them down and translating them into simpler language. We worked on finding the main idea in a passage by eliminating choices which were just small details of the passages and looking for the choice that encompasses the broadest amount of the passage. Then we worked on the verbal section--synonyms. We tried to find context for words, put them into sentences, figure out the parts of speech, and break them down into their roots to find similar words.

The student and I did several assessments to determine where he is with in a variety of academic areas, so that I can reassess what we need to continue working on and what new concepts we should add to our lessons. He also completed a few of his assignments from the previous week.

The student and I focused on writing and math in today's session. We went through her first writing prompt line by line, and discussed her successful sentences and how to improve the ones that were lacking. We also talked about format and content. Overall, with some writing practice, she has the potential to produce an excellent writing prompt. We then shifted our attention to math, where we spent a good deal of time learning all about lines: the equation of a line, slope, y-intercept, how to graph a line, slopes of parallel lines, and slopes of perpendicular lines. For homework, she will complete section 2 (reading) and section 4 (math).

The student and I had our first session today, and it went very well. We spent the majority of our time on the reading section. Since it was our first time meeting, I gave him a couple passages with questions to read and answer to see where he was strong and where he could use a little more work. Overall he did well, answering most of the questions correctly. We then discussed each of the passages and all of the questions to go over how he was approaching the test. We talked about some of the more important aspects of the exam, specifically finding direct pieces of evidence in the text and how to eliminate certain answer choices. We then looked at math for the end of the session, where he excelled, answering 24 out 25 questions correctly, with his one mistake due to his misreading the question. I gave him some questions to look at before our next session, so we will see how he does on those and proceed from there.