Contracted Spelling

I vacillate back and forth between feeling lost and thinking I’m on top of things with the Contracted Braille class I’m taking.   It’s a much longer course than the initial, Uncontracted Braille course with a lot more in the way of learning how to read braille that I’d actually encounter.   For instance, after working through the past week of work, including instructions for teachers/parents from what my daughter’s done at school as well as her homework, I thought I had things.

Then, today I got back into the next section of the course and I went back to feeling lost.  There are single characters that represent a word, like ‘w’ stands for ‘will’ when it’s standing alone, but there are also common letter groups that have a specific braille symbol like ‘ch’ or ‘th’.   Those can be at the start, middle or end of words.   And that’s throwing me off.   I’m not thinking in letter groups when I type or read words, I’m thinking in syllables, so I’m missing things both in reading and writing braille.  It’s confusing as hell.

My daughter’s VI teacher said she wants to work on spelling throughout elementary school with my daughter because blind children are notoriously bad at spelling.   I didn’t get a good sense of why until recently as I got deeper into the world of contracted braille.   For instance, this is how my daughter would write a sentence:  “I’m j ab full, b I’d l a ll m tea ø  c®fee af my pie.”

There are a lot missing letters word wise in that sentence which we would type as: “I’m just about full, but I’d like a little more tea or core after my pie.”

My daughter enjoys spelling though.  She loves to sound out words and asks how to spell things all the time.   If an adult isn’t available to tell her, she’ll ask Alexa.   And while my daughter is working on spelling, I’m learning how to not spell things correctly via the collection of whole and part-word contractions she’s learning in addition as she’s taught braille.

The Big Boy Update:  My son had a nightmare last night in the middle of the night.   He made such a clatter coming downstairs that he woke his sister up, which almost never happens.   He climbed into the bed and his sister followed, collapsing into a ball on the floor on the side of my bed.   I asked my son if he was okay and if he had a nightmare.   He said, “my brain got full and I forgot what to do.”   I waited about two minutes and then the three of us walked back up to their bedroom, holding hands in a chain as we went.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter came home from school today and informed me, “when I grow up I’m going to get a cat and name him Cheeseburger.”