Award-Winning Test Prep & Academic Tutoring in Hammonton, NJ

Today the student and I worked exclusively on Constructed response questions and began our 1st document based question/essay. This skill requires inferences. He learned to read primary source documents, and to identify the source, and is learning to identify the content of the information. We completed a short primary source document with 3 questions, written by Frederick Douglas, and began an 8 document, 23 question DBQ on US expansion in the 1st half of the 19th century. He is making progress in both his skill and his effort, as well as his ability to remain on task.

Today we reviewed homework dealing with graphing functions. He was working through it well by the end!

The student is progressing well. This week's material was a bit easier in concept, so we spent time reviewing homework problems as well as doing extra problems for practice. The student appeared confident with the material by the end of the session.

Today the student and I went over section 11.5 in her book, which covered finding the volume of cones and triangular prisms. We did four worksheets centered on finding the areas of these figures, 2 over prisms and 2 over cones. The student was easily able to answer the questions about the prisms. We then went over two worksheets that asked her to find the volumes of pyramids, cones, cylinders, and prisms. She answered most of the questions correctly but missed the two questions on cones. For these questions she forgot to multiply her answer by 1/3 which resulted in too large of an answer. After going over the formula for the volume of the cone again, she realized her mistake and answered the question correctly on the second attempt. The student and I then worked on her homework covering section 11.5. The student was able to answer 5 out of 6 questions with no difficulty. The last problem asked her to find the radius of a cone given the volume and the height. She did not know how to approach this problem but as we worked through it, the problem began to make more sense. By the end of the problem she understood that she needed to set the volume given equal to the volume equation for a cone and find her radius by multiplying and dividing numbers as necessary to get r by itself on one side of the equation. After completing her homework assignment, she and I then went back to the worksheets we previously did and found the surface area of some of the questions so as to solidify her understanding of these types of problems.

When I looked at the student's homework on adding/ subtracting fractions, he is still not quite proficient with it. He still has troubles in a sense that it's hard for him to remember the right steps to do those fraction problems. So I've assigned him one more page of homework on fractions. Then we moved on to doing challenging problems from a new book. In that book, we did problems that involved figuring out what number appears next in a number sequence, filling out Pascal's triangle, etc. The student really liked these hard problems because, after all, he likes a challenge. So we're going to stick with the math book for now. Also, I've assigned him two pages from the math book for him to finish on his own.

Today we spent the entire session working on understanding linear functions. In previous sections we covered the basic equation and graphing procedures for a line but nothing more in depth than that. Today, however, we really worked on achieving a thorough understanding of linear relationships. In fact, I believe that the student would agree in saying that he had a major breakthrough today with respect to understanding what the linear function truly means. That is to say, he quickly grasped the idea of taking a word problem and independently constructing a linear model. As I have said from the beginning, he is truly gifted with regard to math. In light of this, we have decided to pepper in some geometry and algebra 2 topics during our sessions. Our primary focus will, of course, remain as algebra 1, but I feel that he is capable of learning the basics of subsequent math courses during this process. I hope that he maintains the level of devotion and enthusiasm that he has been showing up to this point.