Brin was walked through a battery of tests to assess his current capacity to pass the GED test.

Brin was first given short warm-up problems, review statements, and test strategies before each section of the test was administered.

While testing, a tutor was present to analyze Brin's test taking strategies, strengths & growth areas, and to resolve any issues that may arise.

Brin was a confident test taker. He utilized his testing resources well including technology such as a calculator. He paced himself well.

At the end of our sessions, Brin was given a list of additional strategies that he can implement in the future including: lowering his difficulty requirement threshold for flagging a question, quickly reading the questions regarding reading passages before reading the passage, test pacing/reviewing trouble problems, and arriving to the test site prepared with snacks and the like.

Brin performed wonderfully today.

Kelly and I met with her mother Kerry to get to know one another and build rapport. I explained my career journey, my goals in college coaching, the path to college timeline, and what admission counselors are looking for in a candidate. I interviewed Kelly on her course selection, volunteering, interests, and life experiences. Kerry asked for me to share a college admissions timeline and I sent that with a request to follow up with Kerry on what aspects she is interested in of the path to college plan I sent her last week.

Zach and I met and did a final edit on all of the essay pieces he wrote so far. We then worked on some of the smaller supplementary pieces that he is writing for various other colleges. Each one has a different prompt with different angles. We are working with several of the ideas that he has already tailored them to the specific prompts and purposes of each piece. This is a work in progress.

Today, Zach and I worked on two short essay prompts. He wrote rough drafts for both and we finished them both today. Each was 150 words. We worked on organization of ideas and sticking with the focus while characterizing him for the college.

Zachary and I worked on the final draft of his big college essay. It came out fabulous! He has learned some writing skills along the way. Today we made the essay more concise getting it down to 650 words from over 850. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. I'm so proud of him.

Zach finished his main essay today. It is amazing. He should be super proud. We are working on his smaller pieces right now. I think he learned some great writing tips during this experience. :) We will meet again on Tuesday.

We worked on Draft 5 today! I love the "almost" final product! Today, we worked more on organization and reducing the wording from 860 to 650. Zachary has applied everything we spoke about. Great job. We still have some final editing to do and Zach is working on some of his smaller pieces for our next session which is next Thursday.

Today, we worked on Zach's Draft 2 of the big essay. He sent it to me a few days ago. He did a great job in adding more of his story with details, etc. Now we have all of the information we need and are working on organizing his thoughts and condensing repetitive words and ideas. He is working on Draft 3 for next week. We also finished his "Why UCF" essay. Yay! It came out wonderfully.

Zachary sent me his first drafts of his large college essay, as well as one of the smaller prompts, via email. I read, made comments, and printed out some resources to help him to revise for his second draft. We had a meaningful conference. Zach's essay was fabulous for a first draft. My suggestions included adding more details and elements of narrative style to characterize him more. These include strategies such as "show don't tell", figurative language, imagery, colorful adjectives and action verbs. In addition, we discussed Nancy Atwell's strategy "The Rule of Writing about a Pebble" so that Zach could add some more specific characterization of himself. Zach is working on his second draft and we will meet again next week.

We began with collegeboard.org. Alexa established a user name and password. I taught Alexa to navigate Collegeboard.org, especially: how to find practice for SAT and ACT; and how to search for colleges. We then went to “50States Colleges and Universities”.com. Here we logged onto New York, Georgia and California. I taught Alexa how to find colleges in each state that were on secure websites. I then taught her how to navigate each college website, what to look for and to request information regarding each college. The colleges she chose and I recommended were: NYU, Tisch School for the preforming Arts; SCAD - Savahannah College of Arts and Design; Parsons Colllege of Design; FIT - Fashion Institue of Technology in NY; AADA -American Academy of Dramatic Arts - 2 campuses: NYC and LA; AMDA -American Musical and Dramatic Academy - 2 campuses: NYC and LA
Alexa now has a much more informed, and broader view of the college admission process. To end the session, I had Alexa call her mom. Then both she and I told Mrs. Ketchum of all we had done.