Luke was seen in his room for a 45-minute occupational therapy treatment session. Focus of treatment was on improving his bilateral integration/hand usage, fine motor development, graphomotor skills, postural control and sensory processing/organization for improved general performance in various environments. Upon arrival to Luke's room today he talked about some emotions he was feeling and wanted to address them with another student. OT and Luke went to other student's room and Luke proceeded to calmly tell the other student how he made him feel. The other student apologized and Luke was able to go back to his room and felt better. This is a step forward for Luke with dealing with is feelings and regulation in a more mature and calmer approach. Continued treatment in his room with an emotions activity in which he checked in on his emotions on a daily basis. OT showed Luke break cards based on which Zone he is in but he did not respond well to them. Lastly, we worked with small interlocking flat plastic blocks on refined hand skills. Luke was able to make letters and build out these blocks. Great work today.
With paint markers and the magic slate, Richard practiced spelling words (honest, honor, blood, flood). He worked on words with un, pre, and sub prefixes. We watched the rest of the Hoot movie and made a comparison chart of the movie vs. the book.
Today Matthew and I focused on finishing up the last Trig Chapter. Using a given trig ratio and the sign of another, we first had to determine what quadrant our reference angle was in. Then we drew a triangle with the x axis and labeled the sides appropriately. To find the third side we used the pythagorean theorem. Then we used SOHCAHTOA to find all the remaining trig functions. This was a bit difficult at first. Matthew had to recall sine is y, cosine is x and tangent is y/x. He also had to rationalize the answers when they were not in simplest form. I guided him through the problems at first, but toward the end of the class he was able to do them correctly on his own.
Today I introduced to Ben the concept of factoring polynomials. We first started with GCF- greatest common factor. I had Ben explain to me the difference between a product and a factor. He wasn’t positive at first, but when I showed him a few examples he recalled what it meant. I asked Ben to tell me some common factors of 36 and 24. We agreed they had a common factor of 4- but it was not the greatest factor they had in common. So we considered other factors and came up with 12. Next, I added the a variable to the 36 and asked Ben to factor the GCF. With guidance he wrote 12(x+3). For each new problem I added powers of x to make it more of a challenge. Ben was always able to follow the method. For one problem, I wanted to interject to help him, but he asked me not to and said he wanted to figure it out on his own. So I let him, and he came to the correct conclusion! I was very proud of him for taking ownership of his learning. He had an excellent class today.
Joshua did a great job on his Homework yesterday. Today's class we pulled up a Mock Exam multiple choice no calculator. Josh and I went through each problem one at a time. Joshua led the work, articulating his thought process outloud. He got 10 problems in a row correct before he got one wrong. We reviewed concepts with polynomials, logarithms, and rational functions.
