Award-Winning Test Prep & Academic Tutoring in Tutor Miami, FL

"Today we covered a more in depth analysis of "The Miller's Tale", where we discussed which essay topic the student would like to write about. We discussed which topic would play best to his strengths as a writer and which topic he felt the most interested in and excited about. Once we picked the topic, we went through and outlined key ideas and quotes that would be useful evidence to prove his thesis. We also went over ideas for his thesis topic such as "being true to one's self." He got a very good grade on his latest vocabulary test and said he was contributing more in class and seems to have a firm grasp of the story."

"The student and I completed our fourth session today. We began with a review of expressions and vocabulary terms we've been practicing in our past sessions, and engaged in short conversation. I provided corrections when necessary, and we focused on answering with the appropriate subject pronoun and verb ending. We then finished reviewing the uses of "ser" and went over numbers and how to tell time. We went over how to talk about specific and nonspecific events, and how to say a.m., p.m., and how to talk about events that happen in the morning, afternoon, and evening/night. We will now move on to cover the verb "estar," and study how it's different from the verb "ser.""

"The student forgot to complete his English homework. So I gave him additional work to complete for our session. I can see improvements and I am overall happy with his progress. The English section just gets better with more practice. For math, I need him to be more focused and I need him to put in more effort. I want to cover at least 5 major concepts in preparation for 8th grade math. So now that we have had multiple sessions, I will be picking up the pace."

"The student is continuing to do well with her reading. She read for 45 minutes straight. Today, we were working on pauses for paragraphs and more tonality in her voice to help her at school. She is afraid to read aloud, and we discussed how she was afraid to do certain things in our tutoring sessions that she now does easily, because she stuck with it. We also practiced writing creative essays, and she knew where the paragraph breaks were. "

"The student worked on 2-digit by 1-digit multiplication today. We repeated the activities from Monday with the addition of writing thinking bubbles to show the steps to take when solving the problem. She was able to complete about half of the problems correctly. The problems that she solved incorrectly were due to forgetting to add the number that she carries over to the answer she gets when she multiplies the 1-digit by the tens place. To solve this error, we made visual thinking bubbles to record the steps to be taken. She was pleased to discover that she could do this. To check her answer, she used base ten blocks to model the same problem. For homework, she will continue to roll dice to make up new multiplication problems. She will use the model of the thinking bubble that we completed today to continue to use that strategy and then use the base ten blocks to check her work. I am very pleased with her progress."

"Today the student and I worked on something a little more directed to work. After we reviewed where we stopped last time, getting comfortable about when to use the passive voice, we moved on to writing about work. He did two sets of instructions about tasks he does on a regular basis. He was supposed to write instructions for someone who he might be training to do these tasks. Then we worked on rewriting them for clarity. The first set of instructions were a little longer, and we worked on rewriting them together. The second set, I had him write and then do a rewrite himself. We did a final go through, but his second set was better. He was able to improve with putting his active and important verbs ahead of explanations and making the explanations straightforward, avoiding unclear antecedents, and keeping the tense in the present."

"Today, we reviewed examples that were deemed "hard" math SAT problems from past exams that show up on some math portions of the SAT. We covered strategies to select the correct answer without doing work (which some questions require) and also how to solve them if need be. Next week, we will cover the English portion of the exam."

"We focused on persuasive writing for the first half of the session. The student wrote a short persuasive essay and then we discussed it according to the 6 Writing Traits Rubric. We also followed up with our reading from last session and discussed the Tim O'Brien story. We finished by reading the beginning of one of the student's summer reading books, "The Women of Brewster's Place." She was a pleasure to work with."