Award-Winning Private English Tutoring in West Covina, CA

We reviewed for the student's final exam in English one last time, mostly using his study guides. We covered everything.

In my first session with the student I wanted to get a feel for where she was at with her writing, reading and grammar, and see what she and her mother want to get out of tutoring. I went through worksheets and outlines from her English class, as well as read some of her papers and short assignments. We talked about what was most difficult for her this year in English, and where she feels she is strongest. She definitely has a wonderful imagination, and has no problem coherently and cohesively expressing her ideas and interests to me. She is engaging and clearly very bright. Her writing samples that I read had strong word choice and grammar and were at or above most 7th grade writing standards. Her school is very competitive and focused on preparing their students for advanced learning, which is wonderful, but I think it has given her some anxiety about her writing skill level. They are learning literary terms that are verbatim what is tested on the AP Composition test. What we will focus on the most is preparing her to be able to successfully write both long and short in-class responses (with no prewriting), as well as how to outline and organize longer assignments. They spent time this year working on the mechanics of writing- thesis, introduction, transitions, etc. Her comprehension is great and her reading level is much higher than her grade. We discussed her different interests and favorite authors and genres, so as to give me some ideas for writing projects she could work on that would be engaging to her. I asked her to brainstorm/look up some specific books that she wants to read so I could potentially assign some writing to go in tandem with them (I will call her before our next meeting).

Today the student did more comma exercises and a writing prompt, and reread a story which she found confusing, so that she can be prepared to complete a writing prompt on it tomorrow. Tomorrow, I'll have her do another comma exercise as well as that writing prompt. I expect that will take up almost all of our time together, but if we have time we will also work on some spelling.

The student and I began by reading Mr. Popper's Penguins. We stopped frequently to check for comprehension, define unfamiliar words, sound out unfamiliar words, and re-read passages that were difficult. I noted that her has difficulty with forming inferences about character's actions and motivations. We will continue to scaffold making inferences until she develops this skill. We read two passages from the reader. She is much more comfortable with the shorter passages and was able to answer questions with little help. Finally we added two new words to our vocabulary list and reviewed the old words.

Today the student and I really focused on long vowels in words. We played a game where she had to identify pictures that had different long vowel sounds. She then read a book with more complex words in it. She really is trying hard to sound out words. We are still working on breaking apart words and identifying digraphs and chunks within each word instead of guessing what a word might be. We ended the session with a game of Spellominoes, which the student really enjoys.

The student has a quiz on Book 13 of the Odyssey so we went through the study guide together. I helped him understand some of the more complicated aspects of the plot. There was a question on the study guide about some literary analysis/ criticism in the introduction that he was having a difficult time deciphering. I helped him understand the argument that the scholar was making so that he could answer questions on the topic.