Award-Winning Test Prep & Academic Tutoring in Rhode Island

"Today, the student and I worked on derivatives. We worked through several examples of computing derivatives of various functions. We practiced using the product rule, quotient rule, and chain rule. We practiced taking derivatives of trigonometric functions as well. We also went over implicit differentiation and did some examples of it, including finding the second derivative implicitly. We will meet again tomorrow."

"We covered a lot of word problems with related rates, did some natural log derivatives, derivatives of e to the x function with a lot of factoring and simplifying, and covered some definition type problems."

"The student came to the session with questions and her homework. We worked on circumference and area of a circle. After the first half of the session, we worked on distributive property and combining like terms. This session was extremely productive, and one that left her with a lot of clarity."

"The student finished his book over the weekend. We are working on writing a summary of what he read, focusing on the main points and idea of the book. When we started the book he wrote what he thought the book was about and what he was expecting from looking at the cover and reading the summary. He did a good job explaining to me what happened in the book but needed some promoting questions."

"We worked on the student's reading and summarizing, as well as some review of the skills we've been practicing for basic sounds (focus today was on ing, ong, and, ung words). When reading, he is still mixing up the words "a" and "the", but I'm continuing to correct this and explain why it is important not to make these mistakes. He is able to come up with his summary sentence, but still needs a little assistance in condensing it into one sentence versus several sentences. When working on the reading skills, he is struggling with the "ang" sound, wanting to make the short a vowel sound, when it should actually make the long a sound. We will continue practicing this. I have also noticed that he is struggling reading longer words, and tends to skip over them or make up nonsense words. I will be working in the future on two and three-syllable words, and help him figure out to break the words into syllables to sound them out."

"We covered a variety of topics to help the student prepare for Algebra this fall. We started with adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions. Then we went onto working with combining like terms, conducting operations of variables involving exponents, and solving equations. He definitely picked up on the material as we went along! I told him he could take a look at his materials before the next session to see if there was anything in particular he wanted to focus on."

"We discussed the student's upcoming visit to the Belgian embassy. She is going to going to Belgium on a business visit. She needs guidance on how to complete a session with English-speaking agents."

"We had a busy session! As our "tradition," we read an "Amelia Bedelia" book and talked about the idioms used in the text. Next, we worked half of a crossword puzzle (we will finish the rest next week) on idioms. Some were quite challenging, but the student did great. We finished up the reading comprehension packet we began before the student's vacation. Next, we reviewed some place value rules for decimals. We then played Yahtzee-Decimals; the student liked the fast-paced nature of that game, so we will continue with more practice next week. Also, next week, I have another dice game for adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing decimals and we'll work on that as well. I also have a new reading comprehension packet for the student to work on. We will continue to read her "American Girl" book together and I am also going to find another series for the student to read as well."

"We took a break from systems of equations to talk about factoring. This is past what the student covered in his previous class, but as he is getting closer to the new school year, I thought it would be a good time to start introducing the topics for the next level. We started off with some direct factoring of coefficients and then moved onto direct factoring of variables and combinations of the two. We then started to talk some about quadratic factoring and went over the basic techniques involved. I left some practice problems for him to complete before we meet the next time. "