Inventive communication

I attended a talk last night about interventions used for kindergarten speller who do not have alphabet and/or phonetic awareness. The idea is that if a child is given the word "cat" to spell, they may spell it "kdjfdjkdf" or "Ct" or "Kit" representing different phases towards the spelling skill and needs for different approaches to learning to read or write, depending on knowing how a kid perceive words and sounds to play out in written text.

Quirky. But as an adolescent educator I did not have the privilege of thinking deeply about the ways young people begin to make sense of written language, nor anticipate the multiple obstacles that a kindergarten teacher faces when contending with multiple notions of how alphabet text (here represented in typed language) comes into being. It takes much awareness of the patterns in how kids represent their knowledge of given objects. It is a conditioning, in a sense, of mentoring and apprenticing a kid into a world of what spelling and its codes actually are and is much more difficult than one would think.

I didn't face spelling or reading obstacles as a kid and for that I am fortunate. It is one thing to articulate in words, but it is another to be graphic with them. My art of playing the keyboard piano is a learned skill that has been fostered by many years interrogating language. It begins at birth, though, and for kids who struggle with such articulation, the culture of school is a variation of hell. That is something to always keep in mind. (Funny this kid went to Crandal park).