Thursday was picture day. I spent most of the break looking for Nosipho. Her hair is different! It’s so cute. It’s braided now with a red streak it in. Apparently that hairstyle is very popular here. I played with her for a while once I saw her and she saw my ring. Now keep in mind this girl NEVER talks to me, at least not in English. I have no idea how much English she knows but she pointed to the ring and asked “what’s this?” It made my day. I couldn’t believe she said that knowing that she never says anything to me in English. So cute!

Friday was an interesting day. Joel and I (the other long term teacher) had to do reading levels. Basically you give a child a page with a bunch of words on it (see below) and ask them to read the words to you. You have a list of all the words and you just check them off as they read or write an X if it’s wrong. It was interesting for me to see their different levels and learn some of their names. As a teacher’s assistant it’s really hard to learn all the learners name. There are so many of them (1) and 2. You never seem to work with the same ones, making it even more confusing. I suggested to Mel that we take all their pictures and have a resource with their pictures and names so I can learn them. Once they finish reading you count up all the ones they get right and that tells you his/her reading level. It’s very strange if you ask me. Who decided on the reading ages? And how did they decide on the words on the list? I guess I should look for the answers and get back to you on that. It was really interesting and I liked the fact that I got to learn some of their names. It was also a little strange that most of them got the word village right because I thought that was a hard one.

So the list below is what I give each learner. They read left to right all the way down, as far as they can go. I have to stop them after five consecutive wrong answers: that is a mispronunciation or just saying another word instead of the one written.

If they do well then I give them this page of words which gets progressively harder. I was actually really impressed with some of them. As you might imagine encyclopaedia and steadiness were often mispronounced.

Below is the chart used to calculate the child’s reading age based on how many words he/she reads correctly.

And 110 is 14y 3m but it wouldn’t fit nicely into my table (you understand). So not sure if anyone else will find this interesting but I certainly did. I am curious to find out who and how someone came up with this. I was going to write on the rest of Friday but this is pretty full so we’ll save the rest for another day (I know you’re all dying in anticipation).