Monday, June 27, 2022

Monday, June 27, 2022  

   

Another good night's sleep. Yay! I like this track record. I felt like my old self yesterday, energetic. I got up around 6 am after doing two rounds of my supine exercises. I'd lost half an inch off my waist. It was the way I was doing the exercises. 

   

The post-surgical exercises target my legs and glutes only. I'd expanded the exercises to include my abs, particularly when doing the glute exercise. First, I make sure that I tighten the glutes as evenly as possible. This helps straighten out my spine. Then I press my upper arms into the mattress and tighten my abs, pulling them up under my ribs. I hold the pose as long as my glutes and leg can bear it. That's what was reducing my waistline. Of course, there was another possibility. Sleeping sixteen hours a day stretched out my body temporarily. I would find out.

   I texted Mama K shortly after 8 am to remind her I wanted to work with her girls this morning. She had just woken up. She texted when the girls were ready. The first invite didn't go through.

   I had Twin E first. She didn't remember the word there. How many times have we gone over it? I tried having her write it on her forearm. I had her visualize the sound of the word linking hands with the visual image of the letters, press the save button (her nose) and send it down to long-term memory. She went through the same procedure with the word was. When she reencountered one of the words, she tried the wrong one. Oh, boy. This is a memory problem. She cannot remember something she read one minute ago.   

   Twin A was way ahead by the standard of how far behind Twin E was. She's still at a low K level. Both girls are going into third-grade next year. Initially, it looked like E was in better shape than A. Then they switched. I have no idea what is going on. I've tried different approaches. Because I saw some actual recall mixed with conscious decoding the last time I worked with A, I introduced automaticity this time. It was hard to know what was going on. She was not self-aware of her processes.    

    I took a fifteen-minute nap after my session with the girls. I had an hour with the M&W sisters and then my Reading and Writing office hours afterward. When I asked first-grade M, going into second, what she wanted to work on, she chose the asking questions about one sentence at a time. The first sentence was, "The hippo is a large water and land animal." The first question in the IN THE BOOK section was, "What is a large water and land animal?" She thought for a minute and answered, "The alligator." This is a common problem. Kids with comprehension problems often think the answer should come from them instead of the text. She didn't get it when I told her the answer should come from the words in the sentence. Why isn't an alligator a good answer? It is also a large water and land animal.

    I led her through an exercise in absurdity. I said, "I am twelve, have bright red hair, and am six feet tall. What did I say?" She said, "I am six feet tall . . . "Oh, boy. There was a problem. She couldn't remember what I had said. I repeated each description. This time, I had her make a picture in her mind of me at twelve, with bright red hair and six feet tall. Then she could remember the three phrases. She still had trouble understanding the difference between what I said and what she knew was true. It's a hard concept.

 Fifth grade W, going into sixth, wanted to try the Gating Game. I started with a story she had written. She asked to switch to material she hadn't seen before. I selected a passage from a low fifth-grade passage nonfiction passage from Barnell Loft. I wrote the first sentence of the passage. Using just semantic cues was much too difficult. I focused on syntactical cues. The next word is the past of see; the next word is the first-person singular pronoun. She got the past of see. While she had heard of pronouns, she had no idea what the first-person singular was. I covered all the personal pronouns. She needed to learn how pronouns worked. I showed her the word she could refer to any number of females, listing any possibilities. You can only know what a 'she' refers to by finding the reference earlier in the text. While W did well with the exercise, I found it somewhat stressful.

   I took another short nap before my Monday Reading & Writing Office hours. When I checked on the weekend, six people had signed up. One canceled on Sunday. There was no one there when I signed in. Then Jennie came on. She was there last week. She had a question about how to teach writing. Another tutor signed on. She still needed to meet with her student and wanted some ideas. How can I help someone prepare when I have no idea about the student? I have to think of general ideas. I was too focused on solving specific problems. The second tutor signed off. No one else signed on. Jennie had me for herself.

   Her student was in fourth grade. He wanted to work on reading, which she found generally adequate. His mother wanted her to work on writing. Her student was fine generating topics. She read something he had written. I was unintelligible and agrammatic. His mother said he wrote the way he talked. Oh, boy. This kid had a big problem. Jennie thought he might be unaware that he had a problem. She was concerned about hurting him if she made it clear he had a problem. Jennie is Asian. Saying something negative to a person is a no-no. I got through to her when I showed her that if she didn't help him, he would be hurt by his teachers and his peers. He might not be able to hold a job. She was fighting for his life. She finally saw the importance of dealing with the problem head-on.

  Jennie had asked him about what he had written. He argued he had written it for himself and could understand it. This was not a stupid boy, but he may be a highly defended one. I suggested she approach the writing by asking if they could rewrite it so it made sense to her, not just him. This is without judgment. "Be like a kid saying, 'I don't get it,'" Not a school marm saying, "You're wrong." She was with me for an hour and a half.  

  I took a long nap after that session. That was a lot for one day. I slept for three hours.

  With my energy renewed, I did some cleaning in the kitchen. I love my neat, orderly counters. It took me a while to clear out all the stuff Shivani stored on them. I worked on updates, and, of course, I posted the blog this morning.  

  I reposted the announcement for my The Phonics Discovery System videos to homeschooling groups yesterday. So far, no joy. No one has taken the bait. My viewing numbers remained stagnant.