Wednesday, December 21, 2022

  

Wednesday, December 21, 2022 

 

  Another busy day. I persuaded some parents to give me more time with their kids over the vacation break. I was waiting for a response when I signed on at 8:30 with Mama K's crew. I called her. She was away; she would be there in ten minutes and sign them in. I worked with fourth-grade K first. We worked on math, the only focus of our current work. When we started with rounding, I discovered he needed help understanding before and after at the most basic level. I presented it in a way that made it clear to him. He learned it quickly and had no further problems. That took half an hour. It took another half an hour to help him understand and master rounding up to the thousands' place. Today, I worked on addition and subtraction with grouping. He assured me that he knew about regrouping. I gave him 24 + 56=. First, he subtracted four from two. Ignoring for a moment that it wasn't correct, he tried to borrow from the tens place to do the addition problem.

   When I posted the update from December 21, 2021, I was surprised to read that I wrote about my hammer toe a year ago. I remembered it happening after I had my hip replacement.

    I continued to work daily with second-grade M on math. She learns quickly and forgets just as quickly. She looks at the work we did yesterday as if she has never seen it before.

    I had Adolescent D. We continue working on reading third-grade material for accuracy and fluency. He seems to ignore the letters in a word. He reads a word and confuses it with another one that shares a few common letters. I write the word he said and compare it to the word on the page. His perception of letters barely skims the surface of his brain. It's like they're not worthy of his attention. I imagine a speed boat skimming over the surface, often bouncing in the air without contact.