It's been a while since I dropped in to say hi.
First, I continue to send healing vibes to all who need them. I've been lurking, so I know who you are.
Now for tutoring news.
Yesterday, I gave the youngest boy his birthday party, though his actual birthday isn't till tomorrow, but I decided to do it early rather than the day after his birthday so that if tutoring was canceled for some reason, I still had Thurs. to have the party and it would be reasonably close to his birthday. I gave him 2 gifts. First, a small one, which was a pair of blunt scissors. Every child should have a pair of scissors for arts and crafts, IMHO. In fact, we can use the scissors for some projects I have panned: cutting out squares with words on them and assembling them into a sentence.
At the moment, we're working not only on reading simple sentences made up of words he knows but on plurals. All the kids seem to have trouble with endings like the s on the end of plurals and the ed on the end of the past tense. The older ones know this but often don't pronounce them when speaking or write them when they have to write something. So I want to get a head start on that problem with the youngest one. I got started with the others when they were older, when mistakes are more ingrained, so I want to head this one off, and plurals are easier, I think, than past tenses.
So he's also learning to read the numbers spelled out. He knows which numerals are which and can count to ten. We are also still working on adding sounds to words he knows. He knows and, so I add a b to make band, and try to get him to use the b sound in front of and. He's getting better at this, but still isn't sure. I think it's easier for him to just memorize the new word than to make the connection.
So the other gift, the big one, was a Ninjago Lego kit for beginners. He was
thrilled, and he used his scissors to cut the ribbon on the big gift to get it open.
His sister is doing well and read for homework a book about the sinking of the
Titanic. She used a simple form to make a book report on it, and she seemed to do OK, except she thought the name of the submersible they used to look for the shipwreck was one of the characters.
Her brother has a bit more enthusiasm after a brief slump. We're reading about how Hatian sorcerers make zombies. It's interesting that the subjects that most interest these kids are not ones you can find online as reading comprehension for their grade levels, so I had to accumulate info from articles for grown-ups, and the reading is challenging for him, but he's struggling through it because he wants to know about real zombies, not the kind you see on TV and movies. I was faintly aware of this subject, but of course, I learned a lot more about it during all the reading and research I had to do for him. Next will be Voodoo dolls, which, I learned, aren't so much a Voodoo tradition as we think of it but a worldwide tradition of poppets, mainly European influence. In Africa and Haiti, the dolls are used differently than what you think, where someone sticks pins in them to do harm to someone else. But it's interesting that this poppet business is worldwide, and that from it came the name puppet.
I only tutor the oldest boy on Saturday, and last time, he read about Edward Snowden, and then I assigned him a writing assignment to say whether he thought Snowden was a hero or a traitor.
Next Sat., he'll read "Rikkk-Tikki-Tavvi" by Kipling, even though I suspect he won't like that as well as reading about his one true love, video games. But today, I amassed a history of video games for a future lesson, so he'll just have to put up with a variety of reading subjects. At least he's very cooperative.
He has earned stones for a trip, and he doesn't really have a good idea of what he'd like to go do or see. He said he wanted to go to a movie, and I think it's only because I recently took the others to a movie he didn't want to see. I said I'd do that, but it has to be an educational movie, so he's stumped.
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