A mile in her shoes
I’ve kept this seperate from what I’ll say about today’s assessment as it’s really more to do with Aprilia than anything else.
Part of today’s assessment was to read "non-sense words" that is random letter combinations that you can sound out but aren’t actual words. The idea is taht you therefore have to work out how to say it rather than recognising the word straight off, it tests your phono-whats-it-called abilities.
So there I was, labouriously sounding out and working out how it blended together, stumbling over that **** magic E that makes the other vowel a long one and all I could think was that this was Aprilia’s walk through reading. This was how she probably felt every time I ask her to read simple words that I assume she should be able to read because they are "easy". But of course, they are only easy to me because I’ve seen them in black and white for years, for her they are non-sense words, random assemblies of letters to be picked over, sounded out, blended and (if she’s lucky) translated into something that is a word. Suddenly her reluctance to even try seemed so reasonable, so sensible when I looked through her eyes and walked just a little in her shoes and I’m left feeling more and more sure that school would destroy her confidence in seconds and that easing right back on reading for a while and attacking it from diffenent angles is definitely going to be better for her than banging on and on with decoding skills that just don’t seem to be going anywhere yet.
