Saturday, April 29, 2023

 Saturday, April 29, 2023

     When I was young, getting up and moving was preferred over being still. My body was spring-loaded. Now, getting the impetus to move takes conscious effort. Sometimes, I lie in bed and wonder which muscle to trigger to get up. Of course, if I have to pee, I'm up and at it just fine.

   Plans to finish spraying the yard with vinegar were off for the day. Rain was predicted for every hour. Kona used to be the dry side. Hilo still gets lots of rain, but we've been much more than we used to. It's good because watering the garden costs a mint. It's bad because things grow too fast, and upholstered furniture feels dank. 

   When walking with Elsa this morning, one of my walking buddies asked if Elsa just had a bath. Nope. I was not using the steroid cream anymore. With more frequent baths, the tea tree oil worked better than the steroid cream, and it's less toxic. Elsa and I are in a morning routine. When I get up for the day, my first stop is Elsa lying next to Mike's pillows. I kiss and pet her. While petting, I'm also looking for lesions. I figure out if some rough pot is a lesion or just matted hair. Sometimes, the hair is matted because she's been licking on a lesion. I have a scissor sitting on the night table next to the tea tree oil. If I suspect matting, I clip the hair. When I'm sure it's a lesion, I apply the tea tree oil and rub it in. Elsa is great with both activities. She stretches out when I apply the tea tree oil to ensure I get a spot.

   I got in another yoga session today with Yoga Go. They have this fantastic woman modeling the poses. Should there be any doubt, I look nothing like her. I can't sit cross-legged with a straight back- I never could, even as a kid. I sure can't do it now at eight-two.

   I had Mama K's crew at nine am. She signed in late. I called to make sure we were on for the day. Twin E was the first up. When they were signed on and I knew which 'victim' I had to work with, I tried to put the correct file on screen share. Screen share was unavailable. I tried repeatedly. I had endless problems with Zoom. When I did get something up for fourth-grade K. I told them to get him. If I couldn't get the reading file for the twins up, I'd have to cancel for the day unless I figured it out.

   K started reading a fourth-grade passage and flubbed several words. He read silently for slightly. I worked on decoding the word. That revealed another problem. He didn't recognize the -igh pattern. Oops! We had a problem. 

   I switched to a comprehension activity; I asked him to tell me what the passage was about. He quoted the words of the text. No, no. He used to give summaries that had little to do with the text. He used his background information, ignoring the text. I realized after the session I had been giving him mixed messages. I have modeled answering questions using the exact words in a sentence. I must teach him to use only content words when summarizing a passage.    

   I dropped everything and went back to the basics. I reviewed each word in the first three sentences of the fourth-grade passage. I had K identify the bounces in the word (the syllables) and then the individual sounds in a single-syllable word or each syllable in a multi-syllable word.

He needed help understanding the difference between the bounces, the syllables, and the individual sounds, the phonemes, in a word. By the second sentence, he was moving along nicely. Compared to Adolescent D, he was a wiz. D is the most disabled student I have ever had.

  Twin A was next. I started her in material considered the end of second grade. She didn't read smoothly enough to pass an evaluation of her word recognition, but her comprehension has been excellent. She should be reading at the beginning of third-grade instructional level by the end of this school year. I went through the same process with her as with her brother. She also had trouble distinguishing between the bounces in a word (the syllables) and the individual sounds. She caught on quickly.

   Then, I worked with Twin E. She is still on a pre-primer level, struggling to consistently get the word saw right, even after seeing it earlier in the same passage. She did surprisingly well, distinguishing syllables and phonemes, the individual sounds- much better than I expected. I have to remember to check her visual perception. Is she experiencing visual distortion? Are the letters moving around on the page or in her head? I have a remedy for that. Hopefully, it will work for her. 

   I dusted the furniture on the lanai while listening to the Moth Radio Hour. Some describe the dust here as grime. They have no idea what grime is. Grime is what I cleaned off the windowsill in my uncle's Manhattan apartment in the sixties when NYC had its worst air pollution. That was grime. Grime is greasy; it smears. The dirt on my lanai furniture is fine soil, ground-up lava rock. That stuff will someday be fertile ground for planting. It is now, but there's too little on the Big Island. It's the youngest in the chain above the water line. There is a new island hatching to the south of the Big Island, but it hasn't yet broken through the surface of the water.

  It poured most of the day again today. I mean, it really poured. The island was under flood watch. That's not a problem for me. I live on the side of a mountain. The water runs right past us on its way to the ocean. A friend from California asked if I was worried about mudslides. What mud? There's a thin layer of soil on top of the lava rock. If you want to plant a tree, you need a jackhammer to break through. Neighbors just had a stretch of land stripped of haole koa trees. Huge rocks came up in the process. There's a massive pile of them at the edge of the property.

   I bathed Elsa. Her skin looked good, but then it broke out big time. I suspect she may be allergic to blueberries. That's too bad because she loves them. I usually give her three as I'm preparing them for myself. I see an experiment in our future.

. I fell down the Begin the Beguine hole. I never get tired of watching Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire dancing. Everything about the experience is terrific. I found other videos of her dancing alone. It's not that great. I recognize her choreography from her work on Broadway Melody. Eh! But what she does with Astaire! Oh Wow! It's on YouTube if you're interested in a treat.