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

"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. "

"Today we worked through the student's homework assignment, which covered systems of equations. She was engaged and focused the whole time. She has a strong understanding of the underlying concepts. Overall, she did good work this week, and I'm looking forward to our next session, scheduled for this coming Wednesday at 7:30."

"We started off today's session by doing a quick recap of concepts learned last week. I also checked in with the student to see how her homework had gone. She reported that she'd been successful in developing memory tricks for herself and demonstrated them to me. She seemed to be feeling positive about her progress, and I was also very glad to see her be able to recognize and recite key terms. We then continued to work our way through her practice manual, which we've decided will serve as the primary study guide. We reviewed concepts such as objects relations theory and Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and thought up memorable examples of how these theories may be referenced or utilized in social work practice. She felt as though she would need to work on memorizing the theorist attached to each concept (in addition to reviewing her knowledge of the concept itself) and so for homework she decided to make up some memory tricks to help her with that. Finally, we ended by reviewing the concepts that we'd gone over in previous weeks, and I posed some questions surrounding those concepts for her to answer. She did fantastically and answered every one correctly. This was a great moment! She's making definite, visible progress and with time, I believe this success will boost her confidence and help reduce some anxiety, too. She noted that she enjoyed the structure of starting and ending with review, so we'll continue that trend on Thursday! "

"We did a complete review of fractions tonight. This practiced many skills for the student, including multiplication and division. When reducing to lowest terms and converting mixed numbers to improper fractions, her biggest difficulties were not with the fraction rules, but the multiplication and division. Comparing fractions was something that she did excellently with, as she is very comfortable with the cross-multiplication. On multiplication of fractions, she got all of the questions correct. Once we did multiplication of mixed numbers, she started making errors in both the multiplication and division areas. This is what we will focus on for next session."

"We reviewed the student's last practice test. Her raw score for all four sections fall within the 850-890. We went over her two lowest scoring sections; verbal reasoning and reading comprehension. "

"The student's class is repeating the section on quadrilaterals. We went over part of his original test and made corrections. We then moved onto his new test and he completed it. There were topics that he did very well, such as distance formula. "

"The student and I reviewed the quadratic formula and worked on the concept of discriminants. She was able to answer most of the questions on her quiz. Next, we will work on factoring, as she occasionally makes simple mistakes in her math which cause her to miss problems she fundamentally understands. "