Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

 

  Again, the tapping app was off when I woke up at 3. Huh? Did my phone not charge again? No. The battery was at 100%. I wondered why it stopped. Is the app onto my all-night trick? It is that monotonous music that is keeping me from going down negative rabbit holes. God bless that monotonous music.

   It was just Yvette, Deb in Seattle, and me for driveway yoga this morning. Yoga is particularly good for stretching my arms over my head as I lie on the ground. Of course, the left arm will never come down to the ground again. The reverse shoulder replacement prevents that. The surprise is how tight my right shoulder and arm are. They were not affected by the fall. It's months of not moving them through a full range of motion.

    Today, I gave Twin E the choice of practicing the words on the list or just saying them. She chose to practice. Most of the students I work with have poor study skills. I teach them how to study and to move on when something feels secure. When not, repeat the exercise at least three times. Students have no sense of when they know something securely and when they don't.

     I teach them how to memorize. Don't just look at the word and say the letters. See the letters in your mind, then hear the word in your head. The first involves just recognition. The second is 100% recall, both visual and auditory. Then, I worked with A on the words she missed in the 151-175 list. I noticed she had trouble following directions. I'd say, "Say the sound for the letter." She would say the word. I'm unsure if it's a problem with auditory processing or being too focused on what she thinks should happen. I also worked on comprehension with A. We're working with low third-grade material. The question in the passage is which freezes faster: salt water or fresh water? When I tried to illustrate the concept, I saw the problem. One doesn't freeze faster than the other; one freezes sooner than the other. Now, I'd like to know if that's the same thing. The concept of faster versus slower, or sooner versus later, had to be correlated with the falling of the thermometer. I learn so much with children who don't have basic understandings. Seeing it from their perspective changes how I look at the concepts I've taken for granted all my life.

     I continued working on Hatchet with fifth-grade K. He's following pretty well. He is a bright child who just needed some explicit instruction. His intelligence may have created confusion when he saw too many options. He even knew what a metaphor was and understood the idea when the author wrote that the plane clawed through air on its ascent.

     Darby told me that her friend in Hilo died. He'd been sick for a while, but she hadn't known it was that serious. She was deeply impacted by his death.