Monday, October 7, 2024

 Monday, October 7, 2024

 

   I got up around 5, although I hadn't slept soundly. I get more than enough sleep in  24 hours.  I never feel like I'm dragging myself from one activity to the next.  I felt that way for a while after I Covid, but that seems over now.

  I did my morning yoga routine and left for my walk at 6:30. Given I had to go to town at 7:30 for the Chi Qigong, I was cutting it close.  I emphasized walking quickly instead of the mechanics of my walk. I ran into Dean and Nina.  We kept our distance. Nina was still sick. She took a Covid test this morning, and was positive. She said she was going to work today. I was appalled. What about her coworkers? She would be contaminating them.  She said she could go into her job at the police department. She would be masked. She didn't have contact with people at this job. She was not going into her job at Kaiser, where she ran the autoclave. 

   I completed my walk in 30 minutes, a record, making it home shortly after 7. I quickly prepared a soft-boiled egg and buttered toast with red raspberry jam. I left the house just before 7:45. I wasn't caught behind the school bus today because school was on a week-long vacation. I made it just by eight.

   When I arrived at Old A, I didn't see Clyde's car, but I did see him at the shore. He had ridden his bike. When we completed the asanas, I went to Target to buy cream cheese and Haagen Das Swiss chocolate almond ice cream. I wanted to see if the vanilla ice cream tasted how I remembered it several years ago. It was on sale, so I bought two.

   I opened one of the ice creams immediately, anxious to see if it tasted how I remembered it. It didn't. There were two possibilities. First, my taste buds had lost their zing with age. The second was that Haagen Das had changed its recipe. They were using a cheaper or less expensive brand of vanilla bean. Companies were making small adjustments to their products to reduce their costs and avoid increasing their prices.

    I went to Ulu Wini.  When I first arrived, there weren't many kids. I figured I would be heading home when I finished working with the one child who asked for help. Third-grade PH wanted help with reading.

     When I last worked with PH, I noticed she skipped letters when reading them in sequence in text. She agreed there was spinning, so I had her do a spin release. When I checked today, she said the problem was resolved. I asked her to read the letters in sequence. She read them quickly and accurately. 

    She had picked a book to read, but it was at a very low level. I opened a document with 3rd-grade text. She read it slowly and got stuck on a sight word. Did she have problems remembering words? Yes. I pulled up words 1-50 of the Fry Sight word list. She read it slowly and misread the word IT. I asked if she decoded every word, and she answered yes. She needed to learn how to process the words automatically.

  I led her through a BrainManagementSkills task. I asked her the color of her blanket. She didn't know. Could she picture it in her mind? No. Could she picture her mom? Yes. Where in her head?  She pointed to the center of her forehead, which is the place thirty years of experience has taught me is the best. I told her to 'see' her blanket in the same spot. It came up. Then I told her to write the word THE on the blanket. She could do that.  I asked her to name the letters, the first, the second, the last, the middle, the last, and the first in that order. Doing it this way tests the clarity and stability of the image in her mind. Then I told her to think of 'carving 'the letters into her mind as if she were carving them into clay and then 'hear' the word in her head.

   Then, we worked on the next word. PH strained, trying to 'see' it in her mind. I told her to just let it happen and wait until the sound of the word came up in her head. That worked for her. Her effort had worked against her. She needed to allow the words to come up, too. We did a few other words, IT and WAS. She was surprised by the success of the process.

   Shortly after we started working, Shauntel passed out a word search activity. When PH saw it, she wanted to do that instead of working with me. I told her she could complete the word search after she worked with me. I had to push her.  I told her I would leave right after working with her, and she could do the word search activity in a few minutes. It wasn't going away; I was. Remarkably, she chose to work with me, selecting a long-term goal and delaying instant gratification. Had she chosen the word search activity rather than working with me, I would have honored it. My goal was to force her to make a conscious choice. However, I forced her to continue working with me when she asked to stop a second time. I don't usually do that. If students concentrate well during the lesson and their minds wander, I know they've absorbed as much as possible. However, PH is highly distractable and has little impulse control. I excused her once she had gotten IT and WAS through automatic recall. 

    While the youth program had started at 10 am, most students arrived closer to 11.   The two sixth-grade girls I had worked with last week, ML and RM, wanted to work with me. They told me they had trouble reading multisyllabic words. I set about teaching them the six-step procedure. Step one is to identify the vowel letters in a word. ML didn't know what the vowels were. I stopped everything and taught that. It is vital that a reader knows the vowels and is trained to search for them.  I wrote out the alphabet, circled the vowel letters, and told them everything that wasn't a vowel was a consonant. It is just as important to know what's outside a set and what's inside.

   The second step was identifying which of the vowel letters made sounds. In the examples I picked, they all made sounds.  Both girls could read the multisyllabic words I had chosen.  When I asked how many syllables were in the word, they identified it by saying the word and clapping out the syllables.  Great! If you already know the word. But how do you determine the number of syllables in a word if you can't read it?  The number of sounded vowels equals the number of syllables.  We did a small exercise on that.

   The next step was dividing the word into syllables. I teach there must be a division between any two sounded vowels.  They both had a good eye for common patterns.  Their division reflected their knowledge of the spoken word.  The next step is to identify the sounds represented by the letters in every syllable, blend those sounds, and then blend all the syllables.  I teach it is essential to decode each syllable separately before saying the whole word.

   I covered exceptions to the rule that a vowel between two consonants always makes a sound. For example, the  E in the -ed suffix doesn't always make a sound;  it only makes a sound when preceded by a T or a D.  It became clear that both girls were reasonably good at decoding unfamiliar words. Their reading accuracy wasn't the problem. We had to work on vocabulary. They need to recognize suffixes and base words.

  After searching for appropriate text for 6th-grade students, I found Esperanza Rising in my Kindle library. The first sentence had many words they didn't know, draped, vineland, and arbor.  They had trouble decoding draped and arbor.  Actually, it wasn't they.  ML was the only one making an effort. RM was easily distracted. She made minimal effort to engage. She does that in all academic settings.  She is full-on when caring for her younger brothers and sisters. She is an amazing caretaker.  ML engages, thinks, and can infer. RM makes no effort except to avoid paying attention. I asked RM if she would like help learning to pay attention. She said no. I suspect she thinks I will tell her to make more effort. I don't do that. I need to find the cause. I would have to figure out the cause of her inattentiveness. There are at least two that come to mind easily. The first is a dysfunctional neurological pattern. The second is fear of not understanding. A third is a low tolerance for not knowing.  The latter is a cause for anxiety, but it's not the same as a fear of failure. The remedies are different for each cause.

    ML figured out what grew in the vineland. She figured there were vines in the yard. When grapes were mentioned in the second sentence, she understood the vines were grapes vines. Neither girl knew what wine was, nor did that wine come from grapes. We had a short discussion on that.

   ML had trouble reading the word ARBOR.  She got the Ar and got stuck on the BOR. I reminded her to read each syllable separately before saying the whole word. That did the trick. We will continue reading Esperanza Rising.

   ML yawned.  I declared it was time to stop the session. While I ignored RM's distracted state because she is always that way, ML's state was significant. She had absorbed as much as she could.

   Second-grade JM approached me while I was working with RM and ML to ask if she could work with me.  We yelled for her when I was available. She didn't show up. I was packing up when she appeared. She must have gone home, and someone called her to tell her I was ready.

    She read fluently at a first-grade level. I don't have material available at a second-grade level, so  I used the Barnell Loft Drawing Conclusion C booklet. The first units are at a high second-grade level. She read the passage smoothly, and  I asked her to tell me what the passage was about.  

Below is the passage.

"Peo/ple at the zoo in Port/land, Or/e/gon, have a new way to wash el/e/phants. For/mer/ly, they washed the large/animals with brushes. Now, they put them through a car wash. It takes only a minute or two. "The animals seem to en/joy it,' says the zoo man/a/ger."

    I underlined all the references to people, bolded the zoo, and italicized the elephants. Then, I counted the references.

People= 3, ZOO-=2,  and elephants =4.   Since elephants have the highest count, they are the most important topic in the paragraph. The people, the zoo managers, and the zoo are all subordinate to the elephants.

  JM said it was about the zoo.  She remembered a single word from the text. When I asked her what about the zoo, she remembered it was about elephants.  What about the elephants? Where do they live? What they eat? (Thrown in to check comprehension.) How they get clean?  It was difficult to get her to respond. She was very uncertain about her answers.  She may be a cause for concern. 

   I suspected she did what many children do, ignore what the text said in favor of what they thought to be true. I have an exercise for this problem. I say I am a 12-year-old boy with bright red hair. Then, I asked the students to tell me what I said. They compare my statement to their perception of me.  I am an 83-year-old woman with white hair.  JM reluctantly agreed I wasn't 12, and I didn't have bright red hair. But when it came to my being a boy, she thought I was.  I've run into this before. In the Marshallese culture, all females have long hair, and all males have relatively short hair. Because my hair is short, some of these kids think I am a boy. There is nothing about my body that vaguely resembles the male body. Also, I am referred to as Auntie Betty, a clear female marker.  None of that made any difference to JM. She was thoroughly confused.  I asked her if she had ever seen a newborn baby. Her first response was no, but of course she had. Having babies is very important in the  Marshallese culture. There are more than two kids per family. How do people know the difference between boys and girls in infants? She didn't have a clue.  Her confusion baffles me. She is not a very observant or thoughtful child. I'm not sure what the problem is. I do know it is more pronounced in this child than in the other children in the development I have worked with.

   Fourth grade LG's mother texted me to cancel for the day and the rest of the week. Our next session would be on the sixteenth. LG's paternal grandfather was dying, and the family was flying out to spend the week with him. The mother apologized for not answering my phone call. I had no trouble with it, but I'd left her several messages, and she didn't return my calls.  I know this woman suffered a closed head injury, but I suspect there is more going on than that.  I want to give her suggestions to help her support her son in reading more accurately.