After An Educator's Journey

I’ve been using Lindamood Bell as an intervention with my struggling 3rd grade readers.  They are getting the labelling and the production – lip poppers, tongue coolers, scrapers and we’ve been working on the Vowel Circle. After nailing CVC  and CVCe (that’s short vowel and magic e words to the unintitated), I was feeling pretty confident that we could do blends — you know two consonants together and you can hear both sounds.

Well, it took some doing, but we we working our way through a word chain full of  beginning blends by touching felt squares to physically segment each sound. Plan to plane, plane to flane, flane to flame — the “words”  don’t have to be real words in case you were thinking I’d gone off my nut.  And then I asked if anyone in the group could think of a word that began with the /pl/ sound.

Plan – playground – play – please…. all good stuff, right? Until I came to my last little guy who very proudly and in a clear voice offered  prostitute.

Must-keep-a-straight-face! Where in the world did this kid pull up this word? Usually when he responds to anything it’s with a monosyllabic mumble!

As I said, you can’t make this stuff up. We’ll be revisiting blends next Monday.