Tuesday, July 2, 2024

 Tuesday, July 2, 2024 

   I was home alone most of the day, and it rained most of the day. It was a bad day for me. I don’t know how much I need company for mental stimulation or how much I need it to stave off loneliness. The combination isn’t good. It drains me. I’m a true extrovert.

  I did have the Twins today. I did amazing work with Twin E. She had trouble distinguishing between of and from. I wrote of and asked her to tell me the letters in the word and the sounds. She got both correct. When I asked her where in her head she experienced the memory of the letters and then the sounds, she pointed to the correct space for the visual working memory. She was too far forward for the auditory one.  

  I had read that attention and imagination are critical to engaging memory successfully. I suspect imagination engages attention. It’s difficult to pay attention to a static image. I asked E to change the colors of the letters in her mind. She had no trouble doing that. We had to be more inventive when it came to varying the sound. We tried singing the word in different ways.

  Then I drilled her, writing only the first letter of the word, either o or f to see if I could train her to have an autonomic response to the first letter, knowing those were the only two I would write. . Everything went well until I reintroduced the whole word. She made mistakes again. What was going on? 

    E said her mind gave her the wrong word. It scrambled the letters.  She said the o and f of ofwere reverse. The letters shifted around in a counterclockwise direction.  When I wrote the word from she said it came out form. More importantly, her mind gave her the wrong name for the word.  She said her mind wasn’t spinning.  We did some more drills to see what happened. She couldn’t trust her mind.

  She drew concentrate circles, a bull’s eye, and showed me the wrong word went to the center of the bull’s eye, and the right one was on the outer ring. Hmm! I had to think about this.

   After the class, I remembered something I did with students a few years ago.  I had them divide a paper in half vertically. They would write the word the way it was written on the paper in one column and the way it appeared in their mind in the other.  Did she know her mind was giving her the wrong word? If so, she had the right form of the word somewhere in her mind.

    I introduced this approach to one girl right before Christmas. When she came back, she reported she had worked on it over the vacation, but it had ‘stopped working.’ I gave her long words from the New York Times. She  could look at them and accurately report what the sequence of the letters was. She went home to show her mom. Her mom said, “Holy cow!”

   From that experience, I learned that both images can come up. the student has to choose the right one. The right one must be in one location; the wrong one in another. They have to choose the right place just as they must choose between any options.

  I had Adolescent D later in the day.  He has memory problems too. His are more severe than Twin E’s. however, D is considered a bright child because he has good verbal skills. He can playfully banter with his teachers. Neither of the Twins is regarded as ‘smart’ by any of their teachers. If they took IQ tests, I’m sure they tested well below 100.  Because I believe intelligence is largely taught I keep at it. There’s definitely been progress.

    When I asked Twin E to get her sister, she reported back she was asleep. I called their mom, Moma K, to ask her if I could work with Twin A later in the day. She said she was up and got her into the Zoom session. Twin A couldn’t find Dolphins at Daylight, the Magic Tree House book were were working in.  I used passages from the third grade  Barnell Loft series.    

    Twin A is moving ahead more quickly than Twin E, both in her word recognition and her comprehension. She did much better with ‘fluent’ reading today.  She still pauses to figure out a word, but she maintains the melody of the sentence and sounds lightyears better.   I’m going to move her ahead more quickly.  I hope to have her in the 4th grade book by the end of the summer. That means she may test out on a third grade reading level when tested in August when school starts.

    I had Adolescent D before he left for work. He is still struggling with his cold.  He made some mistakes today he hadn’t yesterday. He didn’t acknowledge all the sounded vowels and made fewer syllable divisions than the word required.

   After I spoke to Jean, my friend in Arizona (I have two Jeans I speak to regularly), I went up to Auntie P’s house.  She and Carol were working on a new jigsaw puzzle in the open air garage.  I joined them.  I’m no good when it comes to jigsaw puzzles, but I could look for the straight edge pieces for the border.  I did that.  I also helped turn over pieces face up, so they were easy to see. It was wonderful sitting with them with in person contact. It meant the world to me.