Last year I was teaching a couple of local 13 year old girls who work at the hospital some English when I realised that one had reading problem. She is now motivated to work on this provided I come to her house to do it. She is embarassed about the difficulty she has but likes to work on it at home. She lives in a typical Dominican Barrio the same one where I helped paint at the school.
She is a great girl but cannot read at all. this is obvious to anyone. She cannot spell and Spanish spelling is basically sounding out. She does not even know her alphabet with confidence.
We have been playing games with letters and gettting her to read just two letter combinations she is semi accurate at this now. She is also more willing to try writing. She can read single syllables 80% accurately and now can combine two two letter syllables if she has a three letter syllable she has no idea and in her writig she leaves extra sounds out frequently. She also spins letters backwards and will read el sa le and le as el or even lo as el.
She mixes voweles constantly giving her writing very little sense as she blurs all things together.
Anyway we have begun to work and usually get five minutes alone and a whoel hour with the rest of the kids wanting to play as it is the only diversion in the barrio.
So last week I thought we would do some colouring for the younger kids and she could work more. Unfortunately I hadn't counted on the fact that colouring pencils while on every school kids list is not somethign these kids have even really had a lot of access to so I had teenage girls joining to colour Winnie the Pooh. We had fun... not a lot of reading work but they are all motivated to play and to draw and have fun. One kid who was seven had never coloured.
