Friday, March 17, 2023

 Friday, March 17, 2023

I was awake by 2:30 am. I did my in-bed exercises and fell asleep. I could have gotten up when the alarm went off at 5:30, but I didn’t. I figured I’d doze a bit. It was 7:30 when I finally got up. Mama K arranged for me to meet with fourth-grade K at 8:20. I could only do a short walk if I wanted to be home in time. I fed Elsa and checked I had the file I would need for K on the computer before we left. I made it home in time. I got some chips and a cup of water and headed for the library. I texted Mama K, telling her I had signed in. There was no response by 8:20, so I called. She had decided to leave early; she would call her older daughter and have her sign K in.

   I worked on comprehension with K. Last week, his problem was he didn’t use the material at all but tried to figure everything out without referring to the passage. Today, he completely depended on the passage, quoting what it said and not using his own words to answer the question. I hope it’s a step in the right direction. I also discovered that he has weak conscious decoding skills. He read transportation as transporting, and he couldn’t figure out valve or albatross for love or money- back to the drawing board. I have to review his decoding skills.

  Ben, who glued the granite plaques onto the cement wedges, called and asked if he could stop by and drop off the invoice. He was charging me for materials. I came to $139.09. This is the last payment for the gravesite. I haven’t calculated the cost, but I’m sure it didn’t come to more than $3,000 for both headstones. Done! No one else has to think about it.

  I had Shelly at ten. I remembered the time change. Instead of a five-hour difference, there was now a six-hour one. I love living in a state that does not do seasonal time changes. I had a car accident every spring. I understand I’m not alone. We worked on my sadness. My heart is heavy.

  I asked Jean, my Hanai sister, if she liked jazz. I wanted to recommend Samara Joy to her. No, she didn’t. I called today to check if she liked Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn. Nope. Holy cow! Samara Joy has an incredible voice and sings the American Song Book. Listening to Joy makes me appreciate Ella Fitzgerald’s voice even more. I just took her for granted. Nonetheless, we had a nice long chat. I love talking to her.

 Today, I worked on Phase II w with Adolescent D. Last time, I discovered he didn’t try to hold the letters in his short-term memory before writing them. I limited the number of letters I gave him to three or four. I dictated the letters; he repeated them. Then he wrote them and read what he wrote to me. Writing dictated letters is a challenge to short-term memory. I was surprised that he could do that. Either there has been an improvement, or he never had a problem in the first place but was using the wrong parts of his brain.

 I had a Zoom session with Jana. She had a new student and wanted my advice. I asked how she was doing in her new job. She said she loved it, and her new student was a child from her old job, where she wasn’t very happy. She has to teach math primarily at her new job. Her old job mainly was childminding and some opportunities to teach reading.

 We talked about abstract versus concrete concepts. Math moves through the full range. Some students are good at concrete math and can handle abstract algorithms but don’t understand the relationship between the two. They cannot solve word problems or use math in real-life situations.  

  She talked about problems in teaching long division. I show her math dancing for division. Sorry, I’m not good enough to recreate it here. I’ll try to talk you through it. The four math operations, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, involve steps. There is a sequence of moves. Realizing that I made plaques for the numbers in a division problem large enough for students to step on. I laid them on the floor and walked them through the steps. (They’re called steps for a reason.) Let’s take the problem 7 divided by 2.

 Most of the steps in division are a 1-2-3 rhythm. That pattern is repeated over and over.

1. 7 divided by two is 3. 2) 3 times 2 is 6. 3) 6 from 7 is 1. 4) 1 is smaller than 2. You touch each number as you say it. It is a physical activity. If you watch adults doing division, you can see their hand moving from one position to the next.