Thursday, April 18, 2024
I filled another trash can with fronds to take to Darby. After one or two more loads, I should be finished with the pile the gardener dumped over several years.
I had a session with twenty-six-year-old S. Last time, she refused to do the crossbody blending exercise I wanted her to do to teach blending. It helps students with difficulty hold on to sounds when they blend, keep them in the correct order, and blend the sounds into one sound unit. For example, the student must blend a vowel sound with the following consonant, like an. They touch their left shoulder with their right hand and say the short /a/; then they touch their right shoulder and make the /n/ sound. They repeat both actions until they can consistently make the correct sounds. If a student has no trouble with this activity, you move on quickly.
The next step is to blend the two sounds. They touch their left shoulder with their right hand, sustain the short /a/ sound until they touch the right shoulder and make the /n/ sound. The trick to blending is anticipating the second sound, which slightly alters the first sound. That's how the two blend together.
If the /an/ sound has been produced effectively, the next step is adding another sound. In the word slant, I recommend adding the final /t/ before adding the preceding sounds. Touch the left shoulder and say /an/; touch the right shoulder and make the /t/ sound.
Then, add on the preceding sounds, one letter/sound at a time: left/l/; right /ant/. Then left /lant/; right /s/.
This procedure is suitable for students who have trouble blending sounds. There are other procedures. One is touching spots on the left arm with the right hand to accomplish the same objective. I recommend crossbody blending because it more accurately represents the movement from left to right of English orthography and crosses the neurological midline.
Today, S decoded more consciously. We use the conscious mind to train the unconscious. The more conscious or engaged we are when learning, the more likely it is to stick. This is an easy strategy students can use on their own.
I went to Ulu Wini later in the day. I asked Chantel if 2nd grade MI was available. No, she wasn't there. After I worked with two other students, I caught a glimpse of her. I asked Chantel to send her over. Chantel said something like, "She did it already." She did what? Had she mastered subtraction with regrouping? "Oh? No. She completed her homework." She didn't understand subtraction with regrouping.
I called her over. She came reluctantly. She correctly named the place values for all the 4s in 4444. Then, I switched out the numerals. Did she know the value of these numbers? 2453? No problem. Then I wrote 734
-416
She couldn't give the correct place values for the 416. Not a clue. I had no idea why she might be confused. As I write this, it occurred to me that she may always see problems written as 734-416= on the horizontal, and she had no idea what it meant if the numbers were written vertically.
I proceeded with subtraction with regrouping. I can't believe what M did. Let's see: She knew she needed the quantity in the ones place to be higher if she was going to subtract the 6 from 4. She knew she needed three more. She borrowed 3 from the 7 in the hundreds place and added it to the 4 in the ones place. Interesting! At least she didn't shut down on me.
With second-grade TC, she read Reading Roots #10. She read it reasonably well, but something was off. It looked like she wasn't decoding at all. I wrote -at and wrote the possibilities in that word family: bat, cat, dat, fat, etc. I prefer to do nonsense and meaningful ones because most syllables in multisyllabic words are nonsense when read in isolation. She did extremely well,; found it fun. She said no one had ever done anything like this with her before.
I hadn't worked with first-grade KJ for a while, but she has been rocking it for a while. I took her through the sight word lists. She read up to #150, which puts her above grade level. When she didn't know the word, she decoded it. She'd get it close enough so I could give her the word in a sentence using her pronunciation. She did an excellent job. She is off and running.
I worked with 3rd grade SP. He was a mess today. He couldn't pay attention for two seconds. I did the bull's eye attention exercise. He concentrated while we worked on it. I teach students to select what they want to focus on, not to just focus on me. He was attentive while we did this work.
Interestingly, later in the day, I listened to a podcast on the importance of breathing correctly, primarily through our noses rather than our mouths. Mouth breathing is associated with many health problems, including dementia and ADD. Many cases of ADD have cleared up when the breathing problem is resolved. I can imagine SE is a significant mouth breather.
I am usually a nose breather; Mike was a mouth breather. I knew he would die before me because of his breathing problems. Besides being a mouth breather, he took one and a half to two breaths to my one. Everything said stress- a killer. I couldn't get him to change anything. He was not in the driver's seat when managing his body. He thought my ideas and how I approached my physical care were bizarre. Well, now I'm a widow. My breathing is more like Mike's used to be because of my increased anxiety. The podcast reminded me to return to the breathing exercises I used to do.
I have been watching the daily videos on Gokhale. Good god. They aren't very good- at least not for me. Several have talked about turnout. The emphasis is on the feet. Only one presenter focused on the position of the knees in relation to the feet. She did an excellent job. She showed her mother climbing a step and drew lines on her foot, shin bone and upper leg bone. You could see they were not aligned. After training, her mother could align them. I still haven't heard anyone refer to the hip turnout as necessary to get that alignment or to use it when walking.
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