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Eva wrote a paragraph for me today.
Feb. 5th, 2015 01:35 amAnd I looked at it, and realized most of the familiar words were correctly spelled. The uncommon words like "graffiti" and "tomb" were misspelled (we were talking about whether or not the pyramids were built with slave labor, using evidence to support our conclusion), but I expected that. And they were misspelled in ways that showed guessing rather than any sort of logical or phonetic approach* (meaning that if I didn't know what word she was aiming for, I would never have known), but still - the most common words weren't all wrong.
This is kinda huge.
And on this same day, Ana did some work dividing numbers to three decimal places, and didn't need to be prompted to automatically write it to four and then round. (Well, two of them were dividing by 3s and 9s, so she wrote them with a bar and then went back to write it out in three digits, rounded correctly.)
It wasn't that long ago that I had to drag Ana through this stuff, wondering when she'd see the light, and Eva's spelling really does border on the atrocious sometimes. (She can never remember, for example, that my own name is Connie instead of Coinne. This is typical of her - she gets the right letters, but she jumbles them all up, like that story that gets passed around.)
And then once in a while I look at their work and I go "holy shit, they've actually made progress, it isn't all for nothing!"
It's utterly astonishing. It's like turning around and realizing that they grew five inches, and you know it wasn't really overnight, but you just can't remember it happening!
* The purported goal of encouraging invented spelling among very young children. Eva's invented spelling was much more phonetic when she was younger, taking into account her interesting perceptions of how words are pronounced.
This is kinda huge.
And on this same day, Ana did some work dividing numbers to three decimal places, and didn't need to be prompted to automatically write it to four and then round. (Well, two of them were dividing by 3s and 9s, so she wrote them with a bar and then went back to write it out in three digits, rounded correctly.)
It wasn't that long ago that I had to drag Ana through this stuff, wondering when she'd see the light, and Eva's spelling really does border on the atrocious sometimes. (She can never remember, for example, that my own name is Connie instead of Coinne. This is typical of her - she gets the right letters, but she jumbles them all up, like that story that gets passed around.)
And then once in a while I look at their work and I go "holy shit, they've actually made progress, it isn't all for nothing!"
It's utterly astonishing. It's like turning around and realizing that they grew five inches, and you know it wasn't really overnight, but you just can't remember it happening!
* The purported goal of encouraging invented spelling among very young children. Eva's invented spelling was much more phonetic when she was younger, taking into account her interesting perceptions of how words are pronounced.
