My neighbor just had a get together with 8 cars parked along the road. It must have been a kid's birthday. Their house is tiny and it was 28 degrees yesterday, so nobody was distancing outside! Ugh.

If he's still struggling that much at age 8, I'd be assuming he has a phonemic awareness deficit. I'm attaching a video that explains what PA is, and why it's essential for reading. Basically, unless kids are skilled with phonemic awareness tasks (blending, adding, deleting, substituting sounds in words orally, not in print), they won't be able to use the phonics knowledge they're learning. If I were you, I'd read and watch as many videos I could about the role of phonemic awareness in reading. Then, spend a significant portion of your lessons on that, in addition to letter sounds.

For decodable books, Sound City Reading is an awesome website with free materials. I don't know who made it, or why she's not charging $$, but there are a ton of practice materials on there from CVC on up. I use the materials for reading + spelling practice (as supplements). I've never used her sequence to directly teach reading. I attached a couple examples below. Go to the "PDF files" section of the website. Sound City Reading stories.pdf Short Vowel Workbook.pdf 687670793_SoundCityReading-PracticeforBooks1-4.pdf

My mom had her first Pfizer on Wednesday, and she says she only has a slightly sore arm. BUT she had a major emotional pandemic-related meltdown on the phone last night so I think she might be feeling a bit off although she won't admit it. She has a lot of medical anxiety so she wouldn't even discuss potential side effects of the vaccine. Apparently we now can't use the word "covid" in conversations because she's so done with it all. Wonder how long that resolution will last.

Thanks, all. This is very helpful!

There's also online school. He could take a course a semester while working, and see if he likes it. I did a master's online and was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. One great and not-great thing about college is having to take a wide variety of courses, even if your interests are pretty narrow. I did my undergrad at a liberal arts college, though, so maybe it's different at a different kind of college.

If he's not really interested in college right now, I'd support him not going. He could do some certificates/Coursera courses while working another job. If he's more interested in the outcome of a college degree than having the "college experience" of dorm, clubs, etc., he could always go to college in the future if he wants to do it. I think I would have been a much better student if I'd waited till I was older. Taking some low-stakes courses would be a good way to see if he still finds the topic interesting after getting his toes wet. I think this is a really smart idea.

Thanks! I'm pretty conflicted about visiting with one party vaccinated and the other not. Mostly because I could be covid positive, and not know it, and she could be in the unlucky percentage that gets sick despite being vaccinated. Or, I guess she could be fighting off covid and not know it, and maybe pass it to me...?

Made both appointments for my mom! Woo hoo! I haven't been inside her house for a year. When I'm eligible - June, according to Maine's new eligibility list - I'll finally feel okay about going inside. I'll probably have a breakdown!

Hi all, I'm looking for some information about the difference between oppositional defiant disorder and pathological demand avoidance. Are they both on the autism spectrum? ODD seems to have a reputation that a kid just enjoys being defiant and/or has some malicious intent, but PDA is more of a sensory/communication/anxiety thing. Is that distinction at all in the right ballpark?

My neighborhood seems to have decided to keep the holiday lights on until the pandemic is over. It's really friendly to have twinkling lights at night at most people's houses! I'm thinking year-round lights would be good - just change to more spring-like and summery colors 🙂

I like knowing this, but... If the virus is not a lot better by this Christmas, it'll be really sad. I want to go inside someone else's house!

I'm a SpEd teacher, reading/spelling/writing and math. Mostly grades K-5. With math, I find that the admin I work with are mostly concerned with having "a program" to point to in IEP meetings. They aren't open to the idea of teaching specific skills unless there is "a program" being used. When I try to explain the mismatch between a boxed program with its own progression of skills and teaching what an individual kid needs, they have no idea what I'm talking about. We could start another thread so we don't derail this one.

Well, I just wish you were all my colleagues at school - I don't have anyone who wants to talk about this stuff or has the time to do it....

Do you have to do this after every meet? That's going to get so expensive.

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!