Eric W (Lucy Barnsley → Takoma Park)

I am very happy to be accepted by both Takoma Park and Eastern Middle Schools. I was always interested in the GT programs since my older brother is currently in it (Takoma Park MS). I have to give a lot of credit to Dr. Li for preparing me for the Magnet tests.
Last October, I applied for Takoma Park and Eastern Middle Schools and went to Dr. Li’s class. I learned many math, reading, writing, and Raven skills from the lessons and packets I got from them. For math, I spent time every week reviewing the math packet with my parents after school. By doing this, I saw what I did wrong and learned from the mistakes.

Also, I had a chance to see what the test questions might be like. The Quantitative Comparison questions almost matched the questions on the test! For reading, Dr. Li taught us skills and strategies in Reading Comprehension, which were very helpful in the Magnet test. I also learned some smart ways to solve Analogies and Sentence Completion questions. Although these types of questions weren’t on the Magnet test, it was still good to know and I’m sure it will be useful sooner or later. Also, I looked up the words I didn’t know in the reading packet in the dictionary, which might be helpful on the Magnet test. I got a lot of practice, and improved on my Reading skills. For writing, after receiving feedback from the writing teacher for my essay from the previous week, I used the feedback to type up the revised essay on the computer and turn it in the next week.

That process improved my writing skills as I got tons of practice from it. For Raven, I didn’t have any knowledge about it before I attended Dr. Li’s program. I had a chance to get familiar with the pattern questions and learned strategies to solve the problems accurately and easily. I did pretty well on the Raven section of the Magnet test, which might have increased my chance of being accepted into the GT program.

Overall, Dr. Li was very helpful in my preparation for the Magnet programs of Takoma Park MS and Eastern MS, and I am very happy that I went to Dr. Li’s program.