• I drafted the schedule for EmacsConf 2021, taking speaker availability into account.
• I got the hang of solving the 3x3 cube without referring to a guide. Now to build up speed and learn more patterns…
• A- wanted to practise the fish move on the Rubik's cube. We did it 144 times, using the rekenrek in place value mode to keep track of the sums after each round.
• A- pretended she was Cat Ninja doing 3-point landings.
• A- was able to hoop around her neck 12 times in a row.
• A- tried different typing games.
• A- was reading Astronaut Academy silently. I offered to read it to her, and she chose to read it herself instead. I asked her how many new words she was coming across. She told me she knew all of them.
• I flipped through a book on teaching kids how to read. A- was able to read many of the sample sentences, although she stumbled over some of the more advanced phonics rules (ex: costly, costlier, costliest).
• We tried out Teach Your Monster to Read. A- enjoyed playing for almost an hour. I skipped her ahead to the Champion Reader stage.
• More stomach pain for A-.
• A- went as a bat for Halloween. She wore the bat wings I made her out of sofa cover scraps, and I covered her leopard headband with the same fabric to make bat ears. She walked pretty far and did several trips, confidently walking to the houses and greeting people. She kept an eye out for the other kids we were going with, making sure the 2-year-old didn't go near the road. Afterwards, she sorted her candy and shared some with us.
• I showed A- how to use the playing cards to exercise our memories by naming the cards in sequence. I named cards until I started forgetting (~7 cards), and we talked about working memory. Then I showed her how mnemonics could help us remember better by using silly stories. I used the cards to improvise a story using the major number system that I'd modified to use Numberblocks, which I'd taught her previously for memorizing digits of pi. (3 said, "Look at me!" But 5 was too busy laughing at 7, who was riding a kangaroo and chasing 4, who was dressed as a pirate…) She kept bringing me more cards to incorporate into the story, and she said the numbers whenever I paused and prompted her with our mnemonic cues. We got to 23 cards before she moved on to a different activity.
• A- finished the Pre-reader Express course on code.org. We tried a few puzzles from Course C, but "turn left" and "turn right" were a little difficult for her to think about. We might revisit this once she's more comfortable with left, right, clockwise, and counterclockwise.
• We played lots of math card games: Garbage (filling in a 10-frame), Make 10 (adding two numbers), and Gain and Loss (black cards add, red cards subtract). She was able to use number bonds to quickly add or subtract numbers on the rekenrek. For example, when she needed to add 8 to 17, she could add it as + 3 + 5 (add 3 beads on the second row, then add 5 beads on the third row) instead of counting the beads one by one.

Blog posts

• 2021-10-04 Emacs news
• 2021-10-11 Emacs news
• 2021-10-18 Emacs news
• 2021-10-25 Emacs news
• Weekly review: Week ending October 1, 2021
• Weekly review: Week ending October 8, 2021
• Weekly review: Week ending October 15, 2021

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