Saturday, January 28, 2023

 Saturday, January 28, 2023

     At 9 in the morning, I had a session with Mama K’s crew. I tried the Fernald approach to memorization with Twin E. on a few words. With the Fernald method, you write the word, cover it, and write it again. You repeat this procedure five times. Then, I switched to identifying sight words in a third-grade passage. E reverts to decoding strategies rather than using automatic recall. When I pushed her, she tried the latter and did well. She had to be constantly reminded to use it.

   Twin A reread the third-grade passage on a creature seen in Africa that looks like a cross between a dinosaur and an elephant frightening the natives. She tried to use her recall of the text rather than the letters on the page, making mistakes. She had to be reminded to stick to the print.

   I asked fourth-grade K if his teacher had given him a printout of our written material on Wednesday. No. I was surprised at first. Then he told me he couldn’t write about a violent video game. Ah.  That’s good to know. I wrote the teacher. I was glad of her rule. While I am freaked out about videos that use violence for entertainment, I was also pleased because I could use it to practice his verbal expression skills. I used the subject of Fortnight because it was something he knew and was passionate about.  

   Later in the day, I joined a Zoom meeting Damon arranged to celebrate his mother’s birthday on the 22nd. He did try for one last weekend. I was in church when he called to ask me to get on. I found out today that the event was a technological failure. While last week, there were many more people, this week it was just Jean, her husband John, her son Damon, and me.

   Jean commented it was an ‘alta cockers’ group. Except for Damon, we were all over eighty. Jean started off the conversation with current medical tests and treatments. Damon and I made our contributions. A big part of the ‘alta cockers’ social life is with medical personnel. John had nothing to add.  

  Scott brought in two large bags and placed them on my kitchen counter. They were both packages from Oofos. One contained the two pairs I was expecting. The other contained the three pairs I had been expecting since December 27.   When I called last week, the customer service guy made it sound like the order for three slippers was held back because they didn’t have one of the colors, but they failed to let me know. I now had the two I was expecting after the last phone call, the one they sent me in error, and the three I had ordered in December. I now had a total of eight pairs of Oofos. The question is, how much did they charge me?