Friday, November 11, 2022

 Friday, November 11, 2022 

 

  I had an acupuncture appointment today. I told her the difference the chiropractor made by working on my back. The acupuncturist started with a back massage. My back muscles are ropey. I didn’t talk much today. It’s harder to talk when I’m lying on my belly with my face jammed into a cradle. 

   I was supposed to have the M & W sisters this morning. Sixth grade W goes to a private school; they didn’t have Veteran’s Day off. Poor girl. Boohoo! I worked with second-grade M on story writing. She was reluctant. It was hard to get a coherent story out of her. When I asked her who her characters lived with, she told me the story was imaginary. Does she understand how you use her real-life experiences to create an imaginary story? I will have to review that.

  I had a ten-minute session with adolescent D. We meet twice a week for half an hour; we work on phonic rules then. We meet three times a week for ten minutes; then, we work on phonemic awareness. I sound out the phonemes in a word, and he has to figure out what it is. Some students find this a piece of cake. When we started, D needed help blending /t/ and /oo/ to make the word to. He reversed the sounds. We are now working on two-syllable words. He runs into serious trouble when confronted with consonant blends, two or more consonants in a row. He can’t hear them. He also had problems hearing the difference between /f/, /s/, /th/, /ch, and /t/. When we started, he couldn’t even hear I was making a sound when I said them. Turning up the volume on his computer solved that problem. I thought the problem might be hearing the sounds over Zoom. Other students didn’t have the same problem.

  Despite continuing problems hearing sounds clearly in two-syllable words, he has made considerable progress. His mom told me the other day he picked up a magazine lying in the car while driving and read it out loud. She was stunned. He was reading big words with ease. She was pleasantly surprised.

  I continued working on washing sections of the library floor and dusting shelves. I washed the large window on the east side of the house. 

   A hard wind blew for most of the day, the type that slams doors and clears palm trees of dead fronds. There was no rain. It was cooler than it had been. The wind blew in the Hawaiian winter. That’s a few degrees cooler than it is during the summer. A few degrees make a big difference.