Monday, December 19, 2022

 Monday, December 19, 2022

    There were warnings a bad storm was coming with high winds, but, oh boy. It poured during the night. It rained the rest of the day. I did my walking inside.

   At 8:30, I had Mama K's crew. The Twins were available, but fourth-grade K was out with his dad. I worked with comprehension with Twin A. I read a Kindergarten level story. Her comprehension was good, although I had to pull information out of her. Her mom says both girls act like dumb blondes, protesting they know nothing. I asked Twin A if she felt she couldn't understand a story when someone read it to her or if she couldn't understand it because she couldn't read the words.

   Twin E read the 5th of the Carpenter stories. It was slow, but she did reasonably well. She had more incidents of automatic recall. The next step would be to teach both girls the vowel sounds. This is going to start with a drill. With Twin A, I planned to move away from the phonetically dedicated stories of Carpenter. I know this is what she encounters in school.   

   Wearing a winter jacket, the acupuncturist braved the weather to come to my home for a 1 pm appointment. I told her to come in through the side door. The front walk was flooded and very slippery. The floor just inside the side door was also flooded. I only have a screen door there. I vacuumed the water up several times, but it was still treacherous. Scott thought to put bath towels on the floor. That solved the problem.

  While the screened-in lanai was bearable at 8:30, the mist hung heavily by noon. It was like sitting in the middle of a cloud; it was cold and damp. Yvette came up and moved the table into the library. I closed the door and enjoyed my treatment in the more sheltered atmosphere.

   I showed the acupuncturist what I had been working on and where my muscles needed work to allow for a greater range of motion. Having done that, I told her to follow her instincts. She does good work. She is currently getting her doctorate in acupuncture.

   At 2:30, I had adolescent D. His mother told me he had a parent-teacher conference where he reviewed his strengths and weaknesses. He did an incredible job, comfortably describing his weaknesses and strengths. This would not have been possible a year ago. He is increasingly more comfortable with himself. Fantastic!

   D chose to work on reading for accuracy. He read at least three paragraphs on a 3rd-grade level with decent accuracy and then collapsed. He had to expend a great deal of conscious thought to read accurately. His strength gave out, and he relapsed into old strategies that never worked well. They certainly didn't today. Why isn't his conscious mind learning to pay attention to the letters? D's been working on this problem for a while. Why isn't there more transfer? There are many incidents where he reads with fluency that he wouldn't have before. The old habit of looking at a word's first and last letter and then guessing still pulls at him.

    My Christmas present to myself arrived today- a four-inch chain saw. I was so excited. I have been sawing through thick branches with a hand saw. It's a lot of work. I fantasize about cutting down the haole koas in my neighbor's empty lot that obscure my view of the ocean. Let's see how it goes.  

     I had the M & W sisters at 4 pm. With sixth-grade W, I talked about the book she was reading for class. She does just fine.  

    Scott interrupted the tutoring session to tell me the wind had shifted and flooded the lanai. He moved all the furniture away from the screened area. Nothing looks damaged. With a clear day, everything will dry quickly. In the meantime, I sucked up as much water as I could with my Rainbow vacuum. I dumped the container out three times.

    Instead of working on reading with second-grade M, I worked on math. I discovered she was having some problems. I couldn't get information from her teacher; I checked the Hawaiian DOE standards. We worked on counting up and down by fives and tens, where the last number is either a five or a zero. Her father told me her teacher said she was seeing improvement in her math. I asked her if her progress in math came before I started working with her on it or after. She said after. I was surprised. She caught on so quickly, and I thought she must have made some improvements before I started working with her on math. I don't know why she didn't catch on with the classroom instruction.

  Sandor called. We talked about the weather. He said there were 140 mph winds on top of Mauna Kea and 70 mph at his place. Judy thinks there were gusts as high as 60 mph in our neighborhood.

  I continued watching the Bhutanese film Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, which is about a young man who reluctantly goes to teach in the remotest school in the world. The views alone make it worth watching. At the time of the shoot, no roads led to the village. I read the government was putting them in as this movie was being shot. They captured the last of that lifestyle.