Well, I don't think that's confusing, and I know that base ten is just a choice that people made oh so long ago. I agree with you about understanding taking a long time. For the OP, I wouldn't worry that he doesn't understand yet.

I think I do understand what you're saying - maybe? - but I'm not sure your way would be as effective for teaching a student with a language disability who is very visual. You said that the chips are equally abstract to how we write numbers, but what we're trying to do here is make the abstract part of numbering as concrete as possible. At least, I think that's what we're trying to do. When I think of the "2" in "25," or at least when I do it with students, we build it so the 2 is two physical blocks that are ten units long, and the 5 is 5 unit blocks. So they're not picturing cutting up any numbers into pieces. Maybe this would ruin the abstract understanding of the chips, but I'd probably build numbers with both base ten blocks and chips, side by side.

This is why I love c-rods, and I think why Ronit Bird loves them, too. With my students, we'd find a c-rod, say, the number 8, then find other ways to make 8... 4+4, 2+3+3, etc. Then we'd pretend to glue the smaller pieces together to make the larger one. I'd explicitly guide them, over and over and over, to notice that they can't pull apart the 8 rod, but if we had a saw or something, we could saw it into smaller pieces. If we had glue, we could glue the smaller pieces together to make the bigger one. I think it really helped. After a while they'd say, "Ah! If I just had a saw I could chop this up!" Lol.

I'm a bit late to the conversation, so I see you already beat me to it! Your phrasing is hilarious. 😅 Order up those Ronit Bird books for sure. The Dragonbox apps are amazing and well worth the $. You can get them on non-Apple devices.

I wonder if you could play the same game, but with base-ten blocks instead of chips. I'd be wondering if he just thinks ten yellows equals a green, but just because it's a hilarious part of the game, not because it actually happens in real life math.

Ohhh, it's a deceiving picture. The room is actually a big room split into 4 quadrants with no real walls in between, with one teacher and up to 4 kids in each quadrant. It's loud and chaotic and the complete opposite of what you would want for a kid with learning challenges. Ugh!

Here are some photos of the early subitizing/place value work we did. I'm not sure what we were doing with the c-rods to 30... I think we ran out of tens but he really wanted to get to 30 so we improvised.

I hear you. It's probably time to give yourself a mental break and just go with what he's able to do right now. I know the pressure of wanting to - needing to! - move forward, but ultimately, we can't control that. I had a student a long time ago who had no understanding of numbers over 10. Place value? No way. We did Ronit Bird's dots book, and used her other materials. We built numbers 1-20, on a big table, over and over and over again, with cuisenaire rods, with dot cards, with base ten blocks, etc. We did this for a LONG LONG TIME. Like, almost a year. Finally, one day, he just seemed to... understand! He just needed a really long time to sit with the idea and play with it and explore. After the fundamental idea of place value was there, numbers higher than 20 were no problem.

I have an older student who does this. Turns out she doesn't understand the meaning of the words "before" and "after" in other contexts, either.

He is SO cute, by the way!

I like all of the ideas above. Ronit Bird is the bomb. I love her stuff. Can he count objects 1-1 above 10? You could just work on doing that, but not attaching any numerals to the amounts. How about math stories, like if 4 cats are on the bed and 3 more join them, how many cats are on the bed now?

You're right, thanks! I found the book it's from - $50 for a bunch of assessments. I don't think I particularly need it, but for schools using the DRA or Fountas & Pinnell assessments (which don't give good information), I think this one, with the others in the book, could be useful. Schools like assessments... "official" ones. They just like to see things neatly done and dated and put in a binder... so if we're going to be doing any informal assessing, I'd rather have it be phonics-based than coming from an assessment booklet with pictures so kids can fake it. Really, the assessment process to place kids in RTI, and then to keep them there or to dismiss, is really dismal. And then kids just get stuck in whatever one-size-fits-all program that they're using anyway. It's really shocking the difference between SpEd eligibility testing - psych and the whole nine yards - and RTI, which is just done badly, at least in the schools I've worked at. Something standardized and NOT TOO BAD would be an improvement! Ugh. I need to take a chill pill, but this kind of thing really gets my goat! I just wrote a cover letter for a teaching job and I may have been a bit over the top. Lol. They're going to think I would be a really annoying employee. 😄

Are you able to pick the produce that you want each week?

I've also heard of Misfit Market which sounds like a similar service. One person I know says she loves it.

Does anyone know where this originally came from? I can find oodles of copies online, but no original source. It looks great and I'm going to use it! https://cbl.jordandistrict.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/CORE-PHONICS-SURVEY.pdf Is it from here? https://www.corelearn.com/

CKLA (Core Knowledge Language Arts) has a component of their language arts curriculum called "Skills," aka phonics, and all of their teacher manuals and decodable readers and workbooks are online for free. They are wonderful. The stories in the readers, especially the 2nd grade ones that can be more complex, are wonderful! https://www.engageny.org/resource/grade-2-ela-skills-unit-1

Interesting! What were his scores before?

Yeah.... I'd be nervous to be your SLP 😄

For anyone who is curious, the CDC recently studied and then put out new guidance about the effectiveness of masks, and double-masking, and what protection a person gets from wearing a mask on his or her own, vs. when two people are masked. We'd have to extrapolate from this to make educated guesses about the risk of having more people in a room, with different percentages of people masking. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/double-face-mask-covid-19-cdc/

Do you have an emergency vet in the area? I went to one for the first time a few months ago, and it was a great experience. A bit more expensive but not as crazy as I thought it would be. Cats always have problems on weekends, holidays, or in the middle of the night. It's like a cat law! Hopefully it's nothing 🙂

That's so interesting about generalizing. I completely agree. It's strange to think of generalizing applying to letters and sounds and reading words. I listened to a FB live with David Kilpatrick a couple weeks ago. He said something like, how do we know that phonemic manipulation is important to reading? Because every kid we've ever tested that has trouble with reading, has trouble with phonemic awareness and manipulation. A 3rd or 4th grader is as good as an adult on the tests they do. He said, if someone finds a kid with reading problems who does NOT have a problem with PA, send that kid our way! Because we'd like to study that kid. Because so far, we don't know of any kids like that.

Yes. Seems that dyslexia is a malfunction of many systems in the body. That's why reading research comes from so many avenues - neuroscience, psychology, etc. It's very cool! And a lot to take in. There's just SO MUCH! It's also why each kid needs to be taught differently. It aggravates me so much when schools say, "We do THIS for RTI, and we do THIS for SpEd," and that's the end of it. Not so "individualized," huh? The school I left over the summer has apparently gone over to the dark side in that respect. If you'll believe it, they're doing now "standardizing instruction" to use Fountas & Pinnell for ALL RTI and SPED, with the exception of Wilson for some "really serious" reading problems. (MIND EXPLODING NOW, pardon me while I freak out AGAIN!) My heart breaks for these kids.

This is pretty interesting. I just read a study - briefly, need to re-read - that looked at how good readers and poor readers perceive sounds. I'm not an expert, but I think the gist was that poor readers perceive the differences in sounds less specifically that good readers. The phrase they used was "unstable representation of sound." This fits with what I've observed about dyslexic kids, which is that they have a super hard time linking the printed letters to the sounds, automatically. All of my poor readers had extreme trouble even linking short vowels sounds to the corresponding printed letter. My personal hypothesis has been that these kids have never been able to perceive the sounds very distinctly from each other, so they get the vowel sound wrong about as often as they get it right. The result is just epic confusion. It's definitely possible to fix - using LiPS, other methods - but it takes a long time. It has to be done though! I think a lot of "reading programs" miss these kinds of things, these language processing things as you say. The article is called "Unstable Representation of Sound: A Biological Marker of Dyslexia." You can read the whole thing. I'd love others' input! https://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/8/3500

Where I live in Maine, it's somewhat touristy in the summer, and very pretty all year round. It's not as popular as other parts of the state - it's been relatively undiscovered until recently. Since the pandemic started, tons of people have been moving here from out of state. A house that's $350,000 and therefore impossible to even consider for me, is nothing to wealthy out of state people. Houses are selling in a day. DH and I are kicking ourselves for not buying two years ago, but back then we thought $200,000 was pricey and now we think it's pocket change. It's so strange how perceptions change depending on the market. I don't feel like we can trust our own opinions right now because everyone around us is rushing around trying to buy a house, any house. It stinks!

There's been a lot of talk about syllable division rules on the Spell-Talk listserv. People have been semi-arguing about it - apparently it's a heated topic 😄 The consensus seems to be that syllable division rules (and spelling rules in general) CAN be helpful, but are not helpful in ALL circumstances. We say so many words differently than where the "rules" say they should be divided. An example is "rapid." It would be divided rap/id (to keep the first vowel short), but we SAY raaaa-pid. In speech, we keep the first vowel short, but the p is heard in the second syllable. The goal is to have kids try a method to decode a word, and if it doesn't work (i.e. if the word sounds "nonsense"), try a different way. I was fascinated to hear the technique of pausing at each vowel, and words into dividing syllables that way. I'll quote from someone at Spell-Talk (who is in turn quoting an article!) because they said it better than I ever would: "Here's an excerpt from the Problems with the Six Syllable Approach article: https://www.ontrackreading.com/perspectives/multisyllabic-decoding-problems-with-the-six-syllable-approach Instead, a child should be taught the code, i.e., the viable pronunciation options for any particular spelling, and then taught a simple method of progressing through a word, from left to right, following simple rules that a six-year old can learn to apply, while testing the various options for the spellings that have more than one possibility. He should also not be taught traditional syllable breaks, but rather to break words into "chunks," tending to stop (with a few key exceptions) after the vowel sound in each chunk. Armed with enough code knowledge he will be able to easily learn to march left-to-right through words of many syllables, testing the vowel sounds and retesting as necessary, i.e., when his first attempt fails to yield a recognizable word. A few examples: "Growling" is chunked "grow-ling." If he's reading "the growling dog" and pronounces "grow" to rhyme with "blow" he would get a nonsense word and then instead try "grow" to rhyme with "how," simply applying his knowledge that the "ow" spelling can represent either sound. Now consider the two words discussed earlier, "rapid" and "vapor." He says "ra-pid," testing the first option for the letter "a" and immediately recognizes the word. He then says "va-por" (using the same short-a sound) and gets a nonsense word. So he tries the second option, the long-a sound and gets the word. Essentially he's being trained to do exactly the same thing most adults do when faced with the name of a new drug name that they haven't heard pronounced before, i.e., trying various viable pronunciations for the vowel and consonant spellings to see what sounds reasonable. Maybe they even finally realize they've heard it, but not seen it spelled before, as they recognize a familiar pronunciation from a radio advertisement." Jan Wascowitz wrote on Spell-Talk: "I can lose weight by running, but running isn't necessary for me to lose weight. Running can help me lose weight, but it doesn't build my upper body strength. Even though I can lose weight by running, it is not a good option for me because I have plantar fasciitis. It’s like that for memorizing rules based on letter patterns to divide a word into syllables. I can divide a word into syllables by memorizing rules, but memorizing rules isn't necessary for me to divide a word into syllables. Memorizing rules can help me divide a word into syllables, but it doesn't leverage my oral language system for phoneme-grapheme mappings to develop long term storage of lexical word forms in my long term memory in the same way. Even though memorizing rules based on letter patterns can help with dividing some words into syllables (there are quite a few exceptions!), it's not a great option for many language-impaired students. One clarification I want to add to what you wrote below – and this applies generally, not specific to this thread – is that we don’t want this to be misinterpreted as a free and open license to teach whatever we think works, or whatever we’re most comfortable with because that’s what we’ve always done, or… Yes, “the best teachers will be ready for the moment” and what they do in that moment must be grounded in science and research, be matched to a student’s specific needs, and be efficient because our instructional minutes are limited and precious. To be effective in our teaching, we need to truly understand the ‘why we do what we do’ (based on current research!!), we need to accept that reading (and writing!) really is rocket science with all sorts of layers and complexities that require depth of knowledge, and also diagnostic teaching, dynamic decision-making based on real time error analysis of the student’s performance, flexible thinking and problem-solving…. "