Ana has gotten better about writing her journal lately.

[conuly]

This is due to two things: First, I showed her how to do an outline and made her do one with me before writing her journal, and second, I made a rule about fixing mistakes AFTER we write, and made her sit down with me to edit her journal every day.

Now, the outline concept was a big help, first because it helps Ana organize her thoughts, and also because Ana HATES writing an outline and will jump right into journal time if it lets her avoid it.

The editing was also a big help, first because otherwise Ana would get hung up with paralyzing fear that she was about to make a mistake, and secondly because once she's done (warts and all) she realizes she just doesn't care. (The fact that she doesn't care is probably helped by the fact that I only know one way to edit, and it's not very nice. So once she remembers that - wow, look, time has flown, she wants to go out and play! Truthfully, I don't want to edit her journal EITHER, so whatever.)

So lately I haven't had to stand over her as she writes her journal entries, and boy, how refreshing that is! But maybe I need to pay a bit more attention.

See, she's SUPPOSED to write about her day. Every day. (Actually, she's supposed to write about school. After thinking it over, Ana's come to the conclusion that this is because her principal is a mean meaniepants, but she tries not to hold it against the woman.) Now, she's tried writing about how she hates writing about her day, and she's tried ignoring this rule and making up stories instead, and I guess today she decided to try the passive-aggressive approach:

I whet to the stor after I cam came out of the skool and my sister. after that wegot mulberries. when we got home I did my journal. I rote about mulberries. here it is. we got home befor it raid. after I finish I will go out and dants.

She also drew a carefully labeled picture with tunder, a clawd, raie (rain), linke (lightning), her huse (itself with a labeled windoe, Eva, and dor), and of course "Me"... a child standing directly under two bolts of linke.

I'm not sure where she gets the linke spelling for lightning. Even raie makes sense, she just forgot about the "n" in there, but... linke?

Comments

[conuly]

It is NOT phonetically impossible.

L - makes the sound "l".

igh - ALWAYS makes the sound "I", and counts as one letter grouping.

t - makes the sound (or at least the phoneme) "t". As you observed, in some dialects this might come out as a glottal stop in some positions, and in most dialects (all?) it comes out as a ch in front of the letter r. It's still a /t/, though, even when it's not actually one. It's an allophone of the phoneme.

n - makes the sound "n"

i - makes the sound ih or ee.

ng - makes the sound "ng".

L - igh - t - n - i - ng. Lightning! Just because some of the letters are represented with more than one sound does NOT mean you can't sound this one out using basic phonics. Most words you can. I'm constantly annoyed when people claim that this or that word has to be memorized as a "sight word" because "it can't be sounded out". Well, it usually CAN be sounded out if you know the rules of basic phonics.

But some reading on the subject has left me mildly horrified - people claiming to be an adult when they learned that the rule for when c says "k" and when it says "s" is constant (I remember being taught this waaaaay back in the first grade), or likewise being surprised to find out that the letter "a" officially makes more than one sound (when they thought it only made one, and all other cases were exceptions) and that there's ways of figuring out which sound it makes in a particular word.

As far as train and tree goes... I know. I've even heard people claim that when children misspell these words it's because they're not hearing properly, but really, the problem is that they hear just fine!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"people claiming to be an adult when they learned that the rule for when c says "k" and when it says "s" is constant (I remember being taught this waaaaay back in the first grade)"

It isn't constant, though, because English contains too many words from disparate language-groups with different rules for pronouncing c. Latin c is soft, for instance, and Latinised Greek words are usually pronounced with a soft c (centaur, Mycenae) in English, even though they were pronounced with the hard k- sound in Greek, but there's not a consistent rule even for that. C in Gaelic languages doesn't follow the same rule as it does in Latin, if you can even call it a 'rule' - the monks who first wrote down Gaelic were using the Roman alphabet, poorly suited to the phonetics of Gaelic, and they wrote it as best they could by ear, having no consistent system at all. Linke for lightning might have been perfectly respectable in a scholarly text of the 10th century, except that they didn't call it lightning back then.

LOL, when my daughter was in 2nd grade and having fits over her spelling homework, I used to try to cheer her up by reading her Gaelic words and having her guess how they were spelled. The unexpected result of this was that she learned to spell in Gaelic fairly well, but not really any better in English. Go figure.

[conuly]

It's not constant, no, but I can only think of a very very small handful of words that break that rule. I mean, it wouldn't be English if a few words didn't have bizarre and totally arbitrary spellings, but there are very few common words that break the c rule. If you can point to a few that do, in English, (the only one that springs to mind is "soccer", and that's not the result of borrowing) that's great :)