Saturday, November 20, 2021

 Saturday, November 20, 2021

 

 I had the M & W sisters first thing in the morning.  I used to work with them during the week. Then they got involved in sports activities that had them practicing in the afternoons after school.  Since mom wanted to keep it at an hour and a half a week, she scheduled them for Friday afternoon and Saturday and Sunday mornings.

   I used to have first grade M reading and rereading the Carpenter stories for low-level readers to build up her sight recall and her confidence. Today I wanted to apply Phase I of the Phonics Discovery System to 2nd-grade material.  I also wanted to write another story with her.  I gave her a choice between story writing, going back to the Carpenter materials, or working on the 2nd-grade level.  I told her it was her choice. There was one I preferred, but I wanted her to choose what she wanted. She hesitated. Then she announced she wanted to work on the ‘names.’  ‘Names’ is what she calls a story she wrote a while ago that I used to do Phase I.  I thought it was too hard for her. There were several two-syllable words in it. The second-grade material is lower.   This was perfect. My concern is moving ahead learning how to decode words. This was fine. 

   We did some story writing too.  M came out with one line, “The cat went to the pond with her friend.”   I don’t remember what prompted her to say this, but I saw it as a great opening line for a story. She was able to write from her imagination today, writing a more complex story.  I have found co-writing an excellent method for helping students develop their imagination and verbal expression skills.

    Up to now, I have had 5th grade W just read regularly formatted text. I thought she needed practice, and that’s it.  She made enough errors as she went along that I switched her from reading standard text to transcribed text, with the word broken up into syllables and phonemes.  It improved her reading. Today, I started the process of having her transcribe the words with me.  I was shocked.  She had extensive Orton Gillingham training. Yet, she had difficulty separating the vowels from the following consonants.  They were merged units in her mind.  Yes, viewing them as merged units is a goal. However, I have discovered that if you want to improve your reading accuracy and speed, you have to go back to Phase I, identifying each phoneme in each word.  How do I know that?  I recorded five stories, phoneme by phoneme.  When I was finished, I saw an immediate increase in my reading speed.  I was shocked. I realized the sense of it.  Professional musicians practice the foundational elements of music, the scales. They will practice for one or two hours a day. This is how they hone their skills.

     When I met with adolescent D later in the day, we continued with the copying activity.  He did pretty well. He described the ‘trick’ he used when copying text. He would collect what he could and then look up.  I’m pushing him to collect letters not by the number he thinks he can hold in his mind but by patterns to reinforce his word decoding skills.  Earlier this week, he claimed he didn’t read the words as he wrote them.  As he was doing the writing, it was obvious that he did read the words. He would say them before he wrote them.  His lack of awareness of himself and the world around him is stunning to me.  He really believes his classmates don’t know he had trouble reading.  I asked his teacher. She said they absolutely do.  The boys take care of him, actively help him when they think he’s stuck. It’s evident from their behavior, and D still doesn’t recognize the reality.  I don’t know how much of this is emotionally driven, avoidance, versus cognitively. Does he have a neurological problem?  

    When I told him he had read the passage well, he said no.  He pointed out five words he hadn’t been able to read.  I accepted his opinion at the time. Later, I thought, “He did read those words. Several he decoded on his own.”  Did he not consider it reading when he had to figure out the word? Does he think he has only ‘read’ a word when it has spontaneously popped into his mind without conscious effort?  I can imagine that I have other students who think that way too.

   I’m spending a lot of time alone and enjoying it.  I work on the updates and blog entries, and I do some housekeeping and gardening. I watched YouTube videos, so far, mainly about Bob Fosse’s work.  I love watching rehearsals, watching performers learn the dances.  They make mistakes and start again.  It would be good for me to learn some of the Fosse dances. He’s right up my alley.  He had no turnout, hip flexibility. I didn’t suffer from his other problem, which influenced his dance vocabulary; I’m not bald.  His dances involve small moves. The challenge is the isolation and impulses for the moves.  I could have done reasonably well when I was young. Dance training is about learning to isolate muscles, moving one body part while not moving a neighboring one.  I never had the extension of his dancers. Apparently, he didn’t have a good extension either.  While it is easy to learn some version of his choreography, making it look good is a whole other kettle of fish.