Riverview Mentoring Update-4.28.10

Wednesday, April 28

Today was my first day back to tutoring Sam. Last week we had April vacation, and although I was trying to go during the vacation, I ended up having to work, and so could not. The previous week, neither Sam, nor Phil came to tutoring because they were preparing for a school dance.

I'm really impressed with Sam. During the two weeks he managed to finish the last three math problems in Lesson 1 and do eight problems in Lesson 2. Last week, Mrs. McDowell checked his work, and helped him work on the ones he had trouble with.

This week, we decided to split our time between math and sentence structure/vocab. For the first half an hour, we worked on math. Sam was going through most of the problems with ease. If we came to a concept he didn't really understand, I was able to break it down into smaller pieces, and he made the connections himself. It was really exciting to see the way he was learning, and piecing everything together. We actually got to three questions that I wasn't sure how to do. Mrs. McDowell came over and was able to help us solve one of them, because I was unsure which method the question was asking for. For the other two question, dealing with patterns, neither myself, nor Mrs. McDowell, nor Sam was able to figure them out, and Mrs. McDowell couldn't find her answer key. I saw that Sam was getting frustrated, so I suggested that we move onto looking at the next problem. After we looked at it, and explained the concepts it included, we decided that same would do that problem, as well as the next problem for homework to finish up Lesson 2. Then he would do the first problem of Lesson 3, and if he had time, after all his other homework he would try problems 2-5 in Lesson 3.

After we finished with math, we moved onto Sentence structure/vocab. We looked in my old SAT prep book to see examples. We ended up looking at filling in the blanks part. We talked about looking for keywords such as "although," "hoping," and "before," or describing words. Those key words would help us determine the kind of word we wanted to use. If the sentence had two blanks, we used the keywords to figure out if the words we were looking for were positive or negative, to help us with the process of elimination. For the sentences with one blank we looked at the keywords, and Sam was able to make connections on his own, between the keyword and the meaning of one of the options, to get the right answer. For homework, I assigned him just two sentence structure sentences because I saw that he better understands how to do this and needs to focus more on math.

Over the past 5 weeks, I have already seen tremendous improvement in Sam. I am confident that if he stays with this rate of learning, he will do very well on his SAT tests this summer. I found throughout this activity that I was able to adapt my teaching/tutoring style to best fir Sam's needs. Although it took some struggle and figuring out exactly what he needed from me, I think that I was successfully able to help him, and teach him some tricks that will help him do better and be better prepared for his test. I will continue to tutor him in the weeks leading up to the end of school, but as we seem to have reached the main goals, I conclude this activity as successfully completed.