26 September
This tutoring session focused on the distributive property. It seemed like a review but it introduced older elements of PEMDAS (order of operations) and combined them with word problems which got a little confusing for PJ. His estimation skills have gotten better but he still has trouble realizing when to estimate and when to solve for the exact solution. Sometimes he'll solve for the exact answer and see if it's close to his estimation rather than just estimate directly. I never told him that that was a bad thing because in mathematics it's always important to check your work.
Because PJ is understanding the word problems more, he's not even using math anymore to solve certain problems. For example, if a problem is asking for how much food an elephant eats over a certain period of time, he'll eliminate numbers that are too small instantly because he understands that they're large animals that eat a lot. And it seems like a good majority of these problems continue this pattern of offering options like this to see if the student understands why they are solving for a certain number.
He actually did very well on last week's homework and there's definitely improvement. He told me that next week's assignment will be different than this.
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