Liam and I worked on various sample SSAT reading comprehension and vocabulary questions. He did VERY well on the reading questions. In fact, he had several passages for which he earned perfect scores. The technique of underlining key words really works for him. Vocabulary is a weaker area, but we reviewed quite a few words today, and I taught him to first establish the RELATIONSHIP illustrated in the analogies. I gave him a 4-page list of vocabulary words he can learn on his own time, as well as additional practice exercises. It was such a pleasure teaching Liam for the past couple of months, and I expect to hear his future success stories.
Oliver has improved at recognizing the problems he should leave blank, but if he doesn't write out the work for the math problems, he's going to have a lot of trouble. He's very capable, but is always looking for a shortcut.
Oliver is a solid reader and should do well on the test. He needs to be sure to confirm his answers, which means slowing down, which is what he needs to work on the most. We also went over the essay and the best way to approach it.
In going over Oliver's practice test for math, it became very clear that he tried to do the math test without actually doing any math. He's a "get done quick" guy, and instead taking each problem step by step, tried to guesstimate based on the answers. He also tried to answer too many questions that were clearly out of his skill level. We went over it step by step, I gave him some specific skills to work on (percentages/averages) and we'll see how it goes tomorrow.
Oliver did another practice section, this time using the sentence technique. His weakness is that he doesn't use descriptive enough sentences, which leads to confusion when choosing the correct analogy. He is MUCH better when he uses the technique I taught him, than not.
Oliver had a lot of trouble on the analogy section of his practice test. But when we went over the questions he missed, I discovered that he didn't use the technique I taught him for any of the questions. He needs to put the first two words in a detailed sentence first to find the connection.
I proctored and graded Oliver's practice SSAT. He misses a lot of math problems, but didn't write out the work for any of them. He did pretty solidly on the reading comprehension, but had a very difficult time with synonyms and analogies.
We went over the different strategies for working with the analogies. Oliver had a little trouble at first, but definitely improved by the end. He needs to be sure to go through the process for each problem. He has a tendency to jump to conclusions.
Oliver has definitely improved, but still needs to work on focusing on each specific details of the question. Often his mistakes are not based on math, but on how he read the problem. We'll continue to work on it.
