Tuesday, June 29, 2021

 Tuesday, June 29, 2021

    On my morning walks, I observe the local wildlife. I see flocks of turkeys, chickens, pheasants, and several other varieties of birds I can’t name. There is a mother hen I’ve been watching with her brood of eight chicks, white, black, and brown. Today, I saw only four. Oh, boy. I first saw them as they ran across the road to avoid a car. I watched the remaining chicks run under the mom’s legs as I approached. I wondered if they ran in response to her signal or because they perceived danger on their own. 

I met with Mana K’s crew this morning. Her son K. is doing so much better. He concentrates. That’s the most notable change. He used to be all over the place. Today, his mom said he looked forward to our sessions. He said the four letters of his last name and the eight letters of his first name forward and backward. He wrote them perfectly. He remembered how to write the lowercase t and h of the. We started work on writing the word fox. He knew how to spell it. He had to learn how to form the lowercase f. He thought he knew and tried to show me. Then he decided that he didn’t know. I modeled it for him. He made a curlicue at the top of the letter. He evaluated his work and asked for a correction. 

      I started using the terms before and after. He had trouble when I asked K what letter came before s in his last name. His sister, E, was in the room and called it out. I need to use the words ‘before’ and ‘after’ more in our work. We finished off forming the letters o and x. The end goal is writing: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, which contains all the letters in the English alphabet. I started with “the fox jumps over the dog” and built it from there.

       Next, I had Twin A. She remembered the name for the letter n easily. It was as if she had always known it. Her mom was in the room. She is very low-key about praise. I’m threatening to come there and give her lessons in enthusiasm. I reintroduced her twin sister’s name. They share all the same letters except for one, the letter e. that’s why I refer to one as A and the other as E. She was able to recall the letter name immediately and repeatedly. There’s a good chance there is a real difference in her memory processing.

     E was next. She read mat correctly but confused pat with map. From what I can see, she has problems with hearing the phonemes. She confused /g/ and/k/. She confused /v/ and /b/; No, her parents don’t speak Spanish, where those two sounds are interchangeable. I had been struggling with where to go from here. I hadn’t been willing to use nonsense words. Today I resorted to that. I changed out every consonant in the initial position: bat, cat, dat, fat, gat, hat, jat, lat, mat, nat, pat, rat, sat, tat, vat, and zat. I didn’t do quat, or wat because that would have added more confusion than she could have borne. I just modeled. Without being asked, she repeated everything I said. This is a good direction to move in.

    As I got up from the Zoom session, I slid my foot under the table to reach a slip of paper. As I pulled it toward me, I saw poop smeared on it. Where did I get that from? Had it been on the sole of my shoe since I came home from my morning walk? Had I been dragging it throughout the house? Then I saw a nice pile near the pedestal of the table. I didn’t get it. Elsa took a poop on our walk this morning. What was this about? I put off picking it up. It meant getting down on my hands and knees under the table and scraping it up. I could deal with the poop. I was putting off the physical act of getting down there and back up again. Also, I had just finished using the Rainbow vacuum cleaner and put that away. Now, I was going to have to get it out again. I pour water on the poop and suck it up with the Rainbow. It does a spectacular job.

     I finally did get down on my hands and knees. I had to lower myself by leaning on the chair. I can’t bend my legs properly. I had to get up the same way. Once I’m down, I’m fine. I got the whole job done. I scraped it up, and I treated the area with enzymes. Once I was up on my feet again, I poured water on the damaged area repeatedly and sucked it up with my Rainbow vacuum until there was no sign of a stain.

Looking at my schedule for tomorrow, I realized that I booked an appointment with my life coach in conflict with my appointment with my new client, sixth grade D. Boy, D is a popular beginning letter for boys’ names.  

     I had a session with adolescent D, as I do Monday through Thursday for the summer vacation. He memorized every word in the 7th grade Barnell Loft passage. I transformed the passage into an alphabetized word list. The first objective was to determine how many of those words he could recognize in isolation. He did 100%. That was great. Even he was impressed. I wanted to use these words to teach phonics patterns. I had been covering them, but he didn’t remember them – no matter how many times I’ve repeated them. I had him identify the ‘pattern,’ meaning the vowel and the following consonants if there were any. Then I wrote every letter in the English alphabet as the initial sound with the pattern: ber, der, fer, ger, her, jer, ker, ler, etc. I haven’t included digraphs yet. He did reasonably well. He was showing some improvement. He could hold the sounds and blend them correctly. Both of those were problems when we first started. More amazingly, he enjoyed the activity. This was a great development.