Ben and I worked out of his Algebra Nation practice and review booklet. We worked side-by-side for the most part. I illustrated some topics at the white board.

Today Ben brought in another worksheet from class and let me know that he has a test coming up. We focused on the worksheet, reinforcing and expanding the skills he had learned and practiced yesterday. As he was leaving, I urged him to practice more on his own because he has the ability, but more practice is necessary so that he does not forget what he's learned on the day of the test.

Ben brought a worksheet from class today. He explained to me what his teacher presented in class, and I showed him how to do the steps in accordance with her lesson using the distribution method. I then showed him how the distribution method could be shortened using the F.O.I.L. acronym. In addition to this short-cut, I taught him the super-short-cut which combines the step of multiplying the inner and outer terms with the step of combining like-terms. For each exercise on the worksheet, I wrote the factors on the board and Ben predicted what the product would be using only the super-short-cut. Next, he used separate notebook paper to work through all of the steps of the distribution method he had been shown in class. We checked his final result against the predicted answer to verify.

Ben explained to me that his teacher will be giving him make-up worksheets for us to work on in the future. In the mean time, we should cover as much of Chapters 1 through 3 as possible, as he missed those chapters at the beginning of the year and needs to review them (from last year) for the EOC test coming up in 3 to 4 weeks. This is in accordance with communication I have received from the administration of Batt Learning Center. Ben and I worked from the Chapter 1 - Part A Review exercises. We did all of the exercises related to the sections we went over yesterday, and then we worked the problems for Section 1.3. We worked side-by-side from the text. Many of the problems, Ben completed orally, and others he completed on paper.

Ben told me that he was expected to cover Chapters 1, 2 & 3 with me because he'd missed these chapters at the beginning of the year. We were able to cover Sections 1-1 and 1-2. I asked Ben how many sessions he thought we would have together before he would take the EOC test, and he thought we would have 3 or 4 weeks. Because we have very limited time and a great amount of material to cover, I asked Ben to consult with his teacher to find out which assignments he missed for these chapters, so that he could do some work on his own, and thereby make our sessions together more efficient.

Ben and I also went over his progress report together. He is going to find out which class assignments he missed (the seven zeros) and what his grades were for Chapter 5.

We went over Ben's worksheet from school. He knew how to do a good deal of it already and needed some guidance and reinforcement.

Ben and I worked on a worksheet provided by his teacher on the topic of regular polygons. As always, I allowed Ben to tell me what he knew about how to approach the problems first, then I would guide him through steps that he was less confident with.

We solved problems on work sheets provided by Ben's teacher. They involved areas of various polygons--parallelograms, trapezoids, kites and rhombi.

We worked problems from work sheets issued by Ben's algebra teacher involving multiplying and dividing monomials with exponents.

Ben showed me the section his class was working on. We went through the lesson examples. I demonstrated how to work the problem, then Ben tried the coordinating "Got It?" exercise while verbalizing the steps of the solution to me.