A toddler on the balance board

Dyslexia often runs in families. For this reason, I am encouraging my grandson to stand on the balance board. All the encouragement he needs is access to the board.  At first when he wanted to play on it, I offered my hand for him to hold. Of course, he also needs older children or adults to leave him alone.  Yes, he is too young.  He turned a year old around thanksgiving, so he is 19 to 20 months old now. He likes to play on the balance board. He walks up one side and down the other. For him it is just a toy.  This week, he was balancing on it correctly.  I just stood off to the side and watched him. It was hard not to go see what else he could do on it. We just leave him alone and let him play with it.  We hope he can develop the learning and balancing skills he needs to learn without the learning challenges that run in our family.

The importance of names

Two friends came out to talk about one of them getting her GED. We worked on her math.  She thinks her sister is smarter than she is.  We played frakle.  I told the sister working on her GED that her name was going to be either smart or brilliant.  My name was wonderful and the other sister was going to be loser.  The one I named loser plays on the computer and wins a lot.  As loser she lost.  I was teaching them the importance of what they call themselves. Often when someone has struggled in school they down themselves when they are really smart but just have not had the opportunity to learn easily.

My neck hurts

Today the 15 year old came in and starting telling me his neck was hurting.  This signals me that he is not planning on staying long.  I let him talk for just a minute and then guided him to tutoring.  Since his neck was hurting, I had him lie on a pad and work on his eyes tracking.  I have him follow the ball hanging from the ceiling with his eyes in several different directions.  Then we did the balance board using the scarves.  I constantly say good, look at how well you are balancing.  If he is having a struggle with the balance, I slow down or wait until the board is balanced again.  The entire time I am using encouraging words.  Then I had him work on the balance board while throwing the ball at the number board.  He had good balance and did well staying on task.  Then we read page 226 in the rocket phonics book.  When he hesitated at a word I gave him the vowel sound.  Most of the time he read the word correctly to which I encouraged with the words "good reading".
Next we played word go fish.  When I say no I do not have it he often thinks he has pronounced the word incorrectly.  He is so accustomed to saying the word wrong. I make sentences with the word as I call out the one I want.
We read the second section of My Side of the Mountain.  I compare the things the boy does in the book with the things the 15 year old does in boy scouts. We should start on page 20 tomorrow.  We tutored the entire hour.

working a child back into tutoring

Today, the 15 year old came back to tutoring.  He went to camp and then we had the 4th of July.  Now how can tutoring be as exciting as firework?.  I knew he would be tired and have to get back into the swing of tutoring.  He was late and did not intend to stay long.  I did not have anyone the next hour so we worked our full hour.  I gently encouraged him. His dad did a great job when he told him he was not swimming if he did not tutor. Go dad.  We started a new book, My Side of the Mountain. When I started reading he followed the words at first.  This is exciting progress.  We mostly reviewed and returned to the structure of tutoring.  I was pleased with the retention he had.  Looking forward to tomorrow.

Is this really reading ?

One child I work with is going into 3rd grade.  She has already failed once and would have probably failed this year had she not already failed a grade.  I have worked for a year to get her excited about even opening a book.
Today at the library she looked through many books and wrote them down as having read them.  She has already read the 20 required to finish the summer reading program.  I read them with her, to her or had her read them to me. When she was telling me  "Look how many I have read." Someone else said, "Yes, and I saw how you were reading them, too."  Where does reading start?  It is certainly not by leaving the book on the shelf.  I went over some of the books she had read. Some of the books she did not understand and possibly had not read or not understood. Instead of telling her I was not sure she had read them, I told her I wanted to see if she understood what she had read. I was pleased at how much she had understood.  Turning the pages and looking at the pictures and words you can read is certainly to be praised in my opinion.

I do not feel well today

Today, the 15 year old I tutor was not feeling well.  This is often the case when he comes.  He uses this as an excuse to cut tutoring short.  His grandmother and I are working on getting him to stay the entire hour.  Today he really did not want to come.  I told him that it was not my fault if he stayed up too late. I could tell he did not have the energy for me to push him.
I started out giving him a drink of water to sip on while I made him some tea.  He takes medicine that makes him feel ill.  I also offered him some chips which seemed to help.
We started out reading the book I am reading aloud to him.  He insisted he felt too ill to stand on the balance board. Then I had him play word go fish to encourage him.  He did well at that and it gives him the confidence to continue learning.  It is so much fun to see him forget he is not supposed to know how to read the word.  He has to build his confidence as well as his ability to read.  I also had him do some memory work.
I told him tomorrow hopefully he will feel better and he hopes so too.

Slow down, I am too tired to learn your way

 Yesterday, I worked with an 8 year old and was excited because I knew what I wanted to do.  Enter the 8 year old. This child was tired and needed permission to regroup.  He came in and asked to play a game. He chose Rummy-O. This teaches the same thing my set- making game does.  It also takes longer.  Instead of drawing one tile each play we drew two each time. Children like to draw tiles.  The object is supposed to be to Win by getting rid of all your tiles first. The child needed to learn how to play and learn grouping of numbers.  You are also not supposed to let the other player see what tiles you have.  We set the tiles up and then helped each other.  Before the game was over he was showing me what I had to play a couple of times.  What a confidence builder for him to find my move before I did.
Then we worked on the balance board and he did well.  I began tutoring by reading every other sentence while the student reads the opposite ones.  This prevents the negative, "You forgot to stop for the period."
It also helps understanding by stopping at each complete thought. I am working for this child to read every other paragraph. He likes the every other sentence better. The reading selections are also longer. He is resisting the longer as it looks harder so we stopped in the middle of the selection.
I hope today goes as well.