well I suppose it had to happen eventually!
Aprilia managed to do her chores, some brainwork and clean her teeth every day for a full week and has thus, for the first time ever, earned her pocket money!
I decided today that we were going to drop the awful Sonlight laern to read books in favour of simple books but with real storylines and phonics be damned! She’s had a set of books with a CD for a while so the stories were familiar to her. She sat happily and read one of them to me, and although I’m sure there was an element of recitation involved she turned the pages at the right times, corrected herself when she said a word wrong and asked what the apostrophe was for in "didn’t" and a few other shortened words and why it was different from an apostrophe showing ownership on a different page in the book. So I’m calling that a success and thinking that I may read out some of her other simple books onto tape so she gets familiar with those and try it that way for a while. It can’t be any worse than the struggles over what should be simple text but where the storyline (and sense) is sacrifced to the greater god of phonics.
She’s been talking to me a lot since Wednesday about what being assessed for dyslexia will be like and what it will mean for her. The testing I could give her a good idea about, I’ve done it (although obviously the IQ test for an 8 year old is going to be different than the one for an adult!) although how she handles "failure" (ie not being comfortable sounding out words which will be a fairly central part of the test) is something we will have to have further talks about as they will stop the test if she gets distressed leaving us without a full picture of her difficulties. What it will mean for her is really something only she can decide but I could tell her that it will mean she will KNOW that it’s not her "fault" that reading is so damned hard for her and at some point it will mean that if she wants to do an exam then she will be able to have certain concessions. Not a lot of benefit really but I do think we ar at a point where it’s heading towards being necessary for her peace of mind that we can prove what her problems are.
Which leads me onto my other bit of fretting. Dyslexia doesn’t make you over sensitive to noise. Neither does it strike you dumb in front of strangers (not to the degree of Jade by any stretch of the imagination but enough to be difficult) Hmmm, and thus I get wobbly. Must get a grip.
