Wednesday, June 29, 2022

 Wednesday, June 29, 2022

 

I slept well for the first part of the night. Around three, I was wide awake. All the naps had caught up with me. That would be good. I wasn't anxious. I didn't need as much sleep because I was well on the road to healing. I did have a problem with my leg throbbing. I overdid it yesterday. However, I could walk without the aid of a walker or stick with ease. I used the walker only to train muscles to work correctly and ensure proper alignment. If I let muscle memory dominate, I'd return to my old bad habits.

 At 9:30, I had Mama K's crew. I started with Twin E. We continued working on memory. She remembered there as where. Close, but no cigar. Close did count. She got a rhyming word. That means there was some auditory recall. That was way better than having her identify the word as was.

  Today I introduced a new exercise. First, I asked E if she knew she had memory problems. Yes. Did she remember what she did yesterday? Yes. She went to the beach. What did she do? She swam and wore goggles. Why did she wear goggles? So she could see underwater. What did she see? Fish. What were they doing? Swimming with the rocks. (So we have a language problem too.) What color were the fish? Silver and blue. Could she see them in her mind? No. When she looked, all she saw was black. She just remembered them. Ah!!! Could she just remember seeing the word there? Yes. And she spelled it correctly. So I will stop talking about visual or auditory recall with this girl. I will just talk about remembering. Since she could do it with the image of the fish, I tried to piggyback on that to have her remember words. That is a leap. The two memories use different parts of the brain and are vastly different operations. Remembering the fish requires using recalling concrete objects. Remember that there makes the word /there/ means connecting two abstract symbols. Let's see if this works. She did somewhat better. I asked her mom if I could work with her for five minutes daily. I wanted to reinforce this process.

  With Twin A, I reinforced automatic processing. I told her to make a picture of the word's letters in her head, ask her mind' for the name of the word, and then listen and wait. She heard the word. She said she remembered. Her mind didn't tell her the word. Okay. Whatever works. When she could accept that her 'mind' might be different than her concept of her, she referred to it as 'he.' I told her it was her mind, so it was a girl too. She did better. We went through Carpenter's second story. We will repeat this passage until she can read it fluently.

  Next, I worked with third-grade-going-into-fourth K. I asked him if he wanted to work on handwriting or comprehension. He chose handwriting. I asked him if his teacher had complained about his handwriting. No. I saw last time that he wrote quickly and his handwriting was legible. It wasn't all perfectly formed; the vertical sizing was off. It also wasn't gorgeous. My first goal when teaching handwriting is comfort. The second goal is to have it be legible. The third is speed. Having it look pretty is last. I asked him if he was still interested. He said no. Let's work on comprehension.

   I chose a slightly more advanced passage than where we had been. K sailed through that. I would choose a more advanced passage for our next session. I wanted to get him reading on a fourth-grade level by the end of the summer.

   I walked Elsa myself this evening. Katie's advice about using the muscles on the outside of my left thigh instead of the inside made all the difference. The gain in strength is pronounced. I had no trouble walking her. I made it down to Judy's and back without discomfort in the hip area.

 Scott walked in with a whole pizza. Yvette had bought two, one for her and Josh and one for Scott and me. Two slices were my max.

   Because Katie recommended it, I wore support hose at night. Yvette brought up a pair she had. When I saw them, I recognized I had two like that in my drawer. We tried them on me once. They had a tourniquet effect and hurt. Yvette proposed to buy a more relaxed pair of support hose at Long's the next day when she was in town.