Monday, April 14, 2025

 Monday, April 14, 2025

    After returning from my morning walk,  I affixed a battery to the hedge trimmer and set it near the shrub I planned to work on. This would push me to get it done. Then, I went inside, finished my morning NY Times puzzles, and ate my breakfast.  Did I hear rain? I sure did.  I rushed out to save my hedge trimmer. It poured for most of the day, so much for my gardening plans.  I devoted the day to indoor chores. I washed the floors.

   At 3 pm, I had fifth-grade GV. I reviewed adding fractions with unlike denominators. Forget it!  Well, he had. I started from scratch.  He got it with a bit of refreshing.  I then taught him how to reduce fractions. I started with the number line. That didn’t work for division as it did for multiplication when finding the common denominator.  What did I do when I was a kid?  Ah. I started with the two times table.  Did two go into both the numerator and denominator?  If not, I tried 3, and so on, and he got that. 

  I discovered that he didn’t know that all numbers ending in an even number are divisible by two, regardless of the size or nature of any other digit in the number. He said, “Cool!”

    I impressed upon him that when reducing fractions, he had to do the same thing to the denominator as he did to the numerator to assure the numbers were equal.  He showed me! He subtracted five from each.  That didn’t work. I knew it didn’t, but I couldn’t explain why in a way that would be easy for him to understand.

   I did show him why the equations are equal when multiplied by the same number. I drew a rectangle, divided it into three equal parts, and then multiplied the numerator and denominator by 20. I showed him that the total quantity didn’t change; it was only the size of the pieces inside the rectangle that did. Let’s see what he remembers from what was covered on Wednesday. 

    Fourth-grade LG was scheduled. He didn’t respond. I called. His mom had left him with her phone. Every time he connected, he was bounced off. He probably was doing something wrong.  When I spoke to his mom later, she said they wouldn’t try that again.  I would prefer if she observed him and saw what he did wrong.

    At the end of the day, I had fifth-grade ZN. His mom was still sick and didn’t have the time or energy to buy the tablet.  ZN had turned a corner. He is more responsive. The Carpenter material, which is very low level, suits him well. He proposed timing his reading to see how he progressed.  He read the first two stories, Sassy the Cat and The Little Lad.  He read all the words from Sassy the Cat from a list in random order. He didn’t want to read the third in the series.

    I broached his ‘memory’ problem.  He said his mom thought he had one, but he didn’t. I showed him the first twenty-five words from the Fry Sight Word Lists.  He misread two immediately. His mom said his short-term memory works, but he couldn’t recognize words he hadn’t seen in a while. Reading the Carpenter material boosted his memory because the words were embedded in a story. He could memorize the story.