Award-Winning Test Prep & Academic Tutoring in Pacifica, CA

We had a very productive session, and together completed math and English language arts home work. His focus and organizational skills have improved.

The student and I reviewed for his test tomorrow. There were a few concepts that were fuzzy, but once we reviewed them, he did the problems without any issues. Great job!

We reviewed Sections 11.1 and 11.2 (Simplify Quadratic Expressions, Multiply & Divide Expressions), then I helped her with her homework.

On our second session, the student and I thoroughly reviewed conics for his Thursday exam. While we previously focused on circles and parabolas, this session made an emphasis in ellipses and hyperbolas. We practiced writing, as well as graphing, conical sections in standard and general forms. He felt very confident with his review, only making small algebraic errors. The student shows impressive understanding of concepts.

Today, the student and I reviewed the criteria of a project he was working on. While the student had put some great effort into the work, he seemed to be missing the mark on what was expected, so we covered the expectations and discussed ways to improve his effort. We constructed a mock project to provide a visual model of what was expected. We also conducted research to back up some of his creative points and defined exactly what he would work on. We also read summaries of the novel he is reading in class as he expressed that he felt completely lost and did not understand what was happening in the book. After reading a brief summary, I asked him a few analytical questions and directed him to a quiz site that would help him ensure he had a good grasp on the reading.

The student's mother and I made a tutor session plan ahead of time and I covered for the student voluminous areas of his studies. First, we went through the history quiz he recently had on Friday and scored well on (for the quiz, he missed only two of ten questions, resulting in a teacher curve grade of 85%; the great news is that his current overall and cumulative grade for the class is an A). We went through the two questions he missed, and one of the questions he missed was due to an oversight of semantics, or a subtly worded question and answer. I taught him a strategy of how to read the answers first, pick what sounded to be the most reasonable answers, and then look at the question. The other question he missed was because it was an inference question. I helped him with sharpening his inference skills, and to find the analog/ synonym for each phrase or word in the original statement. He found the analogs/ synonyms for key phrases and words in the original statement in the question, and was able to find the correct answer. I then covered more test and quiz-taking strategies. Then we looked at another written assignment for his class, which was comparing and contrasting Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. He constructed a chart on his pad, and he identified paragraphs in his textbook that focused on Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt and fulfilled the requirements. We also had some lively history discussion about a question I thought of: "Which of the two civilizations would you live in and why?" He chose Ancient Egypt and so did I, and we discussed reasons why. We then went into the folder for his language arts class, and I proofread his draft and corrected some grammar and capitalization, instructing on how to write effective papers.