Certified Tutors From Inland Massage Institute

We finished going over polynomials, talked about factoring, foiling, graphing, and finding minimums as well as maximums and intervals of increasing/decreasing and prepared him for his quiz. He needs assistance with factoring and finding zeroes. He had extra problems to look over that I texted him.

Today we covered questions in a take-home packet the student wanted to review to prepare for his test.

The student did really well in today's tutoring session. We worked with decimal and fraction operations after reviewing percents and conversions. I can tell that when he focuses, he is able to learn a lot in a short amount of time. I am planning to work with him on some note-taking strategies next week.

We continued working on the same types of complex simplification and solving problems with polynomial fractions. The student had clearly studied the material and was much more comfortable with how to start the problems. She is still a bit slow with some of the later stages of the problems, and I think she still needs some guidance about which techniques are best to solve for x vs. simplify, but I gave her some practice problems, and I think that if she makes as much improvement before Friday as she did between Sunday and today, that she will be ready to tackle these problems on the test.

We spent most of the session going over the problems and concepts in section 3.3 of the student's prep book. Specifically, we talked about different ways to calculate slope, and we talked a good deal about slope conceptually. We looked at how to use slope to describe real life situations, stressing that slope refers to a rate of change. She knew what to do mathematically when given two points. She was also pretty adept at deciphering the word problems in her book. She had a bit of difficulty when asked to explain in her own words the significance of her findings. I will continue to stress a conceptual understanding of things as we go along, as opposed to simply memorizing steps to solve problems. She was, again, extremely receptive to help and willing to try hard to figure things out on her own before I stepped in to help. I suggested she continue with the practice problems in that section of her book and work to understand what she was doing as opposed to just plugging in numbers. We also spent a short amount of time at the end graphing equations on her calculator. She seems to have a good grasp on the basics of this so far. She says she will get the grade from her last test back tomorrow. We will probably review that at our next meeting. Great session today!

Building upon our previous session that covered fundamental addition, we moved on to determining perimeter of various shapes, per the curriculum the family is using for home-schooling. I see the progress in math skills review and retention she is making.