Wednesday, April 20, 2022

 Wednesday, April 20, 2022

   

   I had Mama K’s crew today. I worked with the Twins but not K. He had a killer earache. I was so looking forward to continuing our work on multiplication. He had no idea what it was about. As I think of it, his number sense may be poor in general. When I asked him which addition problem would make a good multiplication problem,4+3+5= or 4+4+4+, he chose the first problem. That was after seeing 3x4= rendered as 4+4+4, plus many other examples. With math, I would love to be working in person. The sensory input of the manipulatives makes a difference.

   I had Twin A first. She read most of the words in the first selection of the Carpenter series, Sassy the Cat. She remembered words I had read for her once. She could be on grade level by the end of the summer, at least in word recognition. I had thought she would get there on her own; I guess not. However, she has made remarkable progress. She was the one I was most worried about when we started. She was behind Twin E. Their positions have reversed.

   Then I worked with Twin E. She didn’t remember the word WAS even though we had spent some time working on memorizing just that one word. She went back to decoding it. She did a good job decoding the word if it had been phonetically regular. It’s not. It requires some degree of memorization. She has either serious auditory processing problems and/or memory problems.

   I called Mama K in a rage. She had to play The Phonics Discovery System auditory file for her girls if she ever had any hope of Twin E learning to read. Truthfully, I can’t guarantee it will work, but the results so far have been excellent. It is certainly worth a try. It only requires the parent to turn it on while the kid sleeps. She can put it on low enough so she can’t hear it. Children’s hearing is much more acute.  

   Kaiser’s travel department called me back. All surgeries are done on Oahu. We have to fly over there. Kaiser pays for the flights and transportation from the airport to the hospital. I must catch a 6 am flight on June 2 after showering with the special antibiotic antifungal soap. The surgery is scheduled for 11 am. The agent scheduled three other flights, one for Lutz to come over the morning of the 3rd and tickets for Lutz and me to fly back to Kona. She made taxi reservations for me to go to the hospital from the airport and back. Lutz will have to catch the shuttle to pick me up. He’ll be traveling with me on the way back to the airport.  

   I had a session with Adolescent D later in the afternoon. I had to switch his Tuesday appointment to Wednesday because I needed to drive to Waimea for my Covid booster. I wrote three versions of the driver’s manual items. One is the normal transcription; it looks just like what you’re reading now. In the second, I di/vi/ded the mul/ti/syl/a/ble words. In the third, I t-r-a-n/s-c-r-ib-ed ea-ch w-o-r-d i-n/t-o i-t-s p-h-o/n-e/m-i-c u/n-i-t-s, b-o-l/d-i-ng th-e v-o/w-e-l l-e-t/t-e-r-s. D always prefers the first version. He hates to think analytically, especially about reading. It seems he does do it when it comes to learning a new video game.   

     I could say D doesn’t want to do anything that requires effort. But I sympathize with him because of my daily struggle to solve the Wordle problem. Some days possible words come quickly. But there are those days when I can’t envision a single word using those letters in those places. It can be agony. When the frustration is too much, I walk away with plans of coming back to it later. Getting any word, even if all six are in the wrong places, is better than not envisioning a single word using those letters. This is what D must feel like. The level of frustration was just too high. When he read well, he read very well. Since I always started with item #1 every time, he was relying on his memory of the sentences. However, I have found that students with auditory processing problems can never remember it perfectly. He uses the print to remind him what the words are. I decided to force him to read the fully transcribed text. That will force him to see the patterns. Hopefully, that will do something. Today, he decoded the word correction. I divided it into syllables cor/rec/tion. He got cor after I reminded him he knew or. Then he figured out rec. He also remembered tion, a significant victory. However, when he went to blend cor with rec, he lost the sound of the cor. On a positive note, he played the audio file for himself last night. I had his mother doing it. I don’t know if she made sure he did it or just forgot about it herself. I’ll have to talk to her.

   Right after D, I had a Zoom appointment with Jana. She volunteered to watch me do my presentation for Phase III. We started talking about her personal life. It relaxed me to think of something other than the presentation. I felt very insecure. She asked fantastic questions. She helped me see that some of the information I included only made everything more confusing rather than less. I also needed to include a section on using this approach to teach spelling. 

   I watched the Amazon video Delicious. It’s a soap opera, hardly profound, but I loved it. The script has fun dialogue, the actors are fantastic, and the scenery in Cornwall, England, is terrific. Then if that’s not enough, it’s a show about a master chef. The food presentations are something else, and a restaurant kitchen is always a dramatic scene.