Monday, April 19, 2021

 Monday, April 19, 2021

 

            I spent the morning making another copy of the PowerPoint video on my reading method. I figured out how to stop and start the recording process once I had the PowerPoint in screen share without the pause button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. I  have to press the Alt-P. The only problem was that I couldn’t tell if I was on pause or recording at any point. I did a much better job on the higher-level passage with natural language, meaning language that is not written using a specific phonics pattern, like words at, bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat, vat, etc.

            I had a session with J. He had to write a definition for words related to volcanoes, magma, lava, eruption, etc. I asked him if he was getting better grades. He said yes. I didn’t ask him if he was only getting better grades on the work I helped him with or all his work. We were finished after half an hour. I did some phonemic breakdown of words. He says it helps him do his work.

            My adolescent D had a bad day. He struggled to get through one paragraph, whereas he made it through three on Saturday. He read many words very well, with ease. He got stuck, badly, on one word. He hates himself because of his reading problems; he pushes himself without regard for good learning practices. I’m going to try to address his self-attacks. If I thought self-hatred would be helpful for one minute, I would encourage it. However, I think it’s counterproductive.

            I finally made a trip down to the lower forty. I sprayed the vegetation growing out of the rock wall. If those plants have their way, they will take down that wall, all rock walls. They cost a fortune to fix, especially the retaining walls, holding back a mound of dirt. Others are freestanding walls that just serve as fences. While I was down there, I checked out my lime tree. I picked about twenty-five off the ground. The tree had many more hanging on its branches, with new flowers popping out all over the place.

            I had I. at 4 pm.. Her mother called about an hour before our appointment to tell me there was an accident on the H-1. Honolulu traffic is terrible in the best of circumstances. It’s a nightmare. It’s a small island. It can take two hours to get from one spot to another and forget getting from one side of the island to another. She finally walked in the door around 5:30. We had our session then. I think I am doing very well. Her oral reading is fluent and flawless. Sometimes she has to stop and decode a word, but she gets it correctly. The mom said a while ago that she wanted to talk to me about I’s classroom teacher. I have been waiting for that call for a while. Today she said she would call me in the morning.