November 15, 2013

1.  We played again The Allowance Game. This time Robert was the first to get $20 and he won.   Yesterday, we made Robert a banker who takes and gives money to all the players.  That arrangement confused Robert a lot leading him to giving others his money or taking other players money for himself.  Today, every player was his/her own banker.  It went smoothly.  He had no difficulties assembling almost mechanically small amount of money: $.45, $1.80, or $1.30.

2. We continued working on paraphrasing section of the Language Elementary  from Linguisystems. A few years ago, Robert and I went through a few first pages of many sections of the book. Now we do almost all exercises although some are difficult for Robert.  Matching synonyms wasn’t a problem, but choosing two out of three short, simple sentences with the same meaning was. Only one word was different in each sentence, so it shouldn’t be difficult to just match the sentences containing two synonyms. But it was. I am not sure why.  It might be because Robert has never before had to match sentences.  It might be because two of the sentences had synonyms, while the third one had an antonym. Robert might get distracted and not be sure if he should match opposites or synonyms.

3. We did exercises in writing.  The first was about the kitchen.  First, Robert had to complete two word- webs.  One for Things in the Kitchen and one for What we do in the kitchen. After he did that, he wrote a short paragraph about our kitchen based on the words taken from those two webs. In a second writing exercise, he wrote a few sentences about The Allowance Game.  He wrote with whom he played and that he won.  He also wrote a little about the rules of the game explaining when a player gets more money and when he/she looses them.

4. He practiced division with a reminder and changing improper fractions to mixed fractions which of course also requires division with remainder.

5. I wrote a few subtraction problems with different units requiring regrouping. Two problems to subtract hours and minutes, two to subtract feet and inches and the last two to subtract pounds and ounces.  A few times in the past Robert subtracted hours and minutes and feet and inches.  Pounds and ounces were fairly new.  The only prompt I gave Robert was to ask him, “How many ounces in one pound.”  After he answered this question without any hesitation he solved the last two problems. I was really proud.  He demonstrated ability to use the same method for different  units of measurements. As I said, I was proud.  Robert not really.  I don’t think he even noticed that he did something we had not practiced before.