Monday, May 17, 2021

 Monday, May 17, 2021

       I was agitated again tonight. I’m thrown back into a state I was in when I was a kid. I lived in constant fear of my mother’s verbal attacks. It always felt like I was always about to be hit with a cattle prod. Tonight, I tried the Lord’s prayer. That did some good. Then I applied phonemic analysis (Phase I) to the Lord’s prayer. That calmed me down immediately. Doing so slows speech and is calming.

     When I came home from my morning walk, I noticed one of the turkey babies frantically running back and forth on my side of the fence while the mama turkey made frantic noises on the other side. I tried to catch the baby. Forget that. It must have hidden in the foliage. I called my neighbor and told her the situation. Mei and I tried to herd mama off her property and out into the street so she could have access to my driveway and her baby. No dice. The stupid bird kept making a beeline for her baby – on the other side of the fence. I gave up. After a while, I did notice that it got quiet. We had a downpour in the meantime. I didn’t know if the mama had given up or if the baby was dead.  

     I meditated for an hour in the morning. I need to do this more. 

     Monday is my day for giving support to the Step-Up tutors in reading. Two weeks ago, I had three people sign up; last week, there were six. Today there were none. I was very disappointed. I love doing this work. 

      I spent a good part of the day on the updates. Doing them is a burden, but they are also a blessing. They give me something to do. I continue checking the stats on the blog. I had trouble figuring out what the stats represented. The first set gives you the number of people who viewed the blog. Then there are statistics on how many pages are read weekly. When I first discovered this page, I had no idea what it represented. I may still be wrong. There was a number in the hundreds for Turkey. Turkey stayed number one for a few days and then completely disappeared. Now, I think one person in Turkey must have binge-read the whole blog. Maybe Turkey will come back again in a month or a year to do more binge reading. There was someone in Russia who reads it daily. Right now, the USA readers have the most pages listed. Fascinating really.

       Climate change in Hawaii:  It has become, get this, cooler. But let’s see what our hot, humid months look like. That’s August, September, and October. Walking around with the fewest clothes on is the only option then. Today we had an intense rainstorm, sunshine, and gentle sprinkles with bright sunshine. The almost daily rain all year long is new too.

I worked with G. on his handwriting, writing, and reading comprehension. I started him on the Barnell Loft material on the 8th-grade level. I didn’t have him read aloud. His word recognition sounded very good before. He answered the questions with ease and went back to the paragraph to explain his selection. I promised him higher-level material in our next session.

      I started working with G on the verbal expression aspect of writing. This is an undeveloped area for him. His mom told me that he was reluctant to complete those assignments when they were given. Ah, G is being home-schooled. The only person monitoring his performance is his mom. She hasn’t pushed him to write more. Finally, we did some work on his handwriting. Today I had him write his name on paper. He said it felt better. He attributed this to the change in his body mechanics. His mom saw it and was unimpressed. I called her and asked for her thoughts. She said it looked better, but it was only his name. Good point. 

No one gets how I work. My first goal with handwriting is comfort, then the order of the strokes, and finally ‘neatness.”  If I can get the first one, comfort, with one word, that is a huge step forward. I’m always looking at the neurological system, not the product. It’s frustrating to be so underappreciated, given my rate of success.              

      My last client of the day with my adolescent D.  I continued with Phase I on a reading paragraph from the eighth-grade level Barnell Loft book. He still couldn’t read this material on his own. The material was on the instructional level. One of the wonderful aspects of this method is you can use material at any level the student can comprehend to teach word recognition. If I worked with a student who didn’t understand the material, I wouldn’t work at this level. All the tricks of word recognition are learned by the end of third grade. After that, reading instruction focuses on sentence structure, vocabulary, complex imagery, and the overall structure of a story or an informative piece.

I had D read the untranscribed words he could. He was able to read most of them. Once he did, we did Phase I on those words. Phase I means analyzing what the individual sounds in words are and which letter(s) represent those sounds- starting from the sound of the word. In doing this, students teach themselves how to read. All good readers had to figure out how to do this on their own. No one has been taught every word or every conceivable spelling pattern. There are more patterns in English than there are stars in the sky- well, close. D was finally impressed with his progress. He posted a clapping hands icon. I was thrilled, thinking he was applauding his improvement. He may have been applauding me. That would not have been as good.