April 5, (Wed.)

Wow, I can be a real sap sometimes… Things have been going really well lately. I’ve been getting real results with the Clear Speech program and the low novices. The group poetry idea is really working out well. I bought a box of fireballs for Jerome, so he is awake and alive again. I don’t think anybody shows him attention, much less affection, all day long.

I’m working on vowels with the novice girls right now, and they are amazed that the letters don’t sound the way their vowels do. They were so surprised to hear that our vowels had lots of different ways to pronounce each one. In Korean and Spanish, their vowels don’t change like ours do. There is ONE way. I’m not sure how much this is carrying over to their every-day speech, but they are doing a really nice job with the poems they are reciting right now. They all did pretty well with “Trees” (except for Gabby, who has been out sick and has to make it up tomorrow, but Lynn is working with her a lot during homework help).

The large group is getting a lot more out of the group work practice that I’ve been creating than I thought. They are working together much better now that they have done it for a couple of days and they know the routine. They even seem to enjoy it! They are remembering the terms and the strategies, and they are able to offer answers when we go back over them each day. I do need to start recycling more, which I realized today when they were trying to figure out the rhyme scheme of “Stopping By Woods” and they couldn’t quite figure it out.