Saturday, October 23, 2021

 Saturday, October 23, 2021    

 

   I had a great night's sleep despite some troubling thoughts. On my morning walk, I called my friend Carol from Ohio.  We met in 2004 in my first year teaching at Licking Heights High School.  She never calls me but always receives me warmly. Not sure what that's about. I enjoy talking to her occasionally. She lives close to one of her daughters with three children. Carol is the family taxi service. She loves her involvement with her grandchildren. I'm sure they love having her involved.

  My leg held up okay on a long walk. I completed close to 4,000 steps before breakfast. When I got back to the house, I walked onto the lanai and discovered a huge poop. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there when I had dinner last night. I sit within sight of that spot.  She must have done it later.  I think I have to take her out after she eats if she hasn't pooped on our before-dinner walk. Again, it is a massive poop, two to three times more than she ever does on our walks.      

    Dash was my first student for the day.  He reported that again he was able to do the work the teacher gave him. She hadn't been requiring any work from him up to this point.  I asked him if he had told his mom and dad. No. "You know how you've been worrying about yourself. Well, they have been worrying about you too. Tell them you can do the work." His mother had bought the clay I requested, six different colors.  I had him form the word THE in the clay.  He chose to create a rope and twist it to form the letters.  This is an approach used by Ron Del Davis. He uses professional molding clay, the kind that can be fired. It's super hard to work with and smelly.  Wrestling with it embeds the impression more deeply; it's still too much.  I think the value of this exercise is embedding visual images more deeply in the sensory system.  I find that students who have problems often feel like they're just skimming over the water.  

     Dash did really well on the reading.  He asks to go through the supported decoding process more often than figure out the word independently. That's fine with me. We're practicing the process, hoping that eventually, it will become automatic. He names the vowel letters; I write them; then, with my guidance, for now, we tack on the consonants, starting with those that come after and the rest one at a time. At each stage, he pronounces the elements he has already written. The good news is that he more frequently identifies the vowel's sound, and he does much better on blending. Today was a very good day. 

    In my work with the sister M & W, I started, as I always do with M, who is repeating first grade.  I have dropped Carpenter stories #1 & 2 from our work.  She read stories 3 through 5 at a good clip.  She completed the first read-through of story #6.  Then we applied Phase I to the words in her story.  This is slow going, but she is requesting it. That's great. She did confuse b/p. I don't know if the problem is visual or auditory. P and B have the same articulation; only one is voiced, and one is not.