Award-Winning Private English Tutoring in San Diego, CA

"The student was working on his summer reading assignment, which involved reading and annotating five short stories and five poems; each story was paired with one of the poems, and after annotating he had to write a thesis statement about a particular topic for each pair. The student stayed focused and had relatively few problems following the plots of the texts - I helped him talk through what the stories might mean, what certain elements might represent, so he could formulate thoughtful thesis statements. He seems ready to tackle 10th-grade English."

"During today's session, the student and I worked on completing his English assignment. He had to define literary terms and provide a literature example, and his own example. We also went over the plan for the next session, which will consist of a quiz, and homework help."

"We read Scenes 3-5 in Antigone, clarified them, and developed discussion questions for her to present in class. We made a schedule for her to follow to read Treasure Island and get her project finished on time. We reviewed her narrative essay and went over her upcoming Spanish project."

"Today was divided between planning and study. We established that we will meet Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, for 1.5 hours per session. Monday and Wednesday will be devoted to regular academics (primarily English), while Tuesday will be SAT prep. The remainder of the session was spent talking about the student's summer reading and working on preparing for art history. As to the summer reading, Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory", I examined a few key scenes with him in order to tease out some key themes. I left him with an assignment to identify three themes and support his analysis with two scenes per theme, for a total of six scenes. For art history, we discussed the basics of analyzing visual media and I had him practice by analyzing a few paintings. All in all the session was solid, and I'm excited to be working with him again. "

"I met with the student and his family for the first time at their home. We spent some time getting to know each other. It was his first day of school so he did not have any homework to base our tutoring session off of. We went over their expectations and what they would like to accomplish during each session. We determined that our first goal is for him complete his homework; however, we want to work on concepts and lessons that ensure he is really retaining the information. Additionally, we went over studying and test taking habits and strategies. "

"Today the student and I began with reading out loud together. I suggested keeping a vocabulary worksheet while she reads so she may also reference/study problematic words after she completes her reading. We continued by looking over personal pronouns and regular verbs, which I feel like she understands very well and comes easy to her. Giving continuance to our past session, we touched on sentence structure (subject and predicate) and discussed the four different types of sentences. As last time, her homework is to read five pages out loud and mark any words she does not understand, and to finish two exercises from the worksheets I made (one for sentence structure, one for types of sentences). She seemed more comfortable today and excited for the lesson. "

"We discussed the rest of 1984. It was a good, deep discussion. The student seemed to enjoy thinking about some tough issues that others his age might not have enjoyed we talked about the ways in which his predictions came true. The philosophy behind the text, and (perhaps most challengingly) the degree to which we can successfully gauge an author's opinion through his fiction. These, of course, are weighty issues, but the student handled them admirably. He's a smart reader, and he'll do well in English class this year. "

"The student and I started the session by working on reading aloud with good fluency, prosody, and rate. Then we moved into writing reflections with complete sentences. Afterwards, he and I learned and practiced the rules for using list, appositive, and commas in complete sentences, and we finished with a quiz on those sentences, which we then corrected."

"Today we dove into English and history. For English, the student began collecting the information needed for each poem she needed to write, based on a book her class just completed. The student has a real talent for writing poetry. For history, we discussed the slave trade. She has an active imagination, thus we used voices and talked about the main details. "