Like 98% of her homework, she had two worksheets with pictures on them. She had to identify which pictures start with the correct letter sound (this week was "A"), cut them out, and glue them to the top of the worksheet.
One of the worksheets had the following pictures:
Ant
Apple
Car
Alligator
Or, if you are 33, ant, apple, automobile, and alligator. Yes, I knew this was wrong. And I never would have complicated things for Sabrina by saying that there were two different words for car. And "automobile" doesn't really start with an "A" sound anyway. Not a pure one, at least.
But the bigger problem is this: if you are four, and you see a picture of an alligator, you very well might think that it is a crocodile.
These worksheets are dumb. But even worse are the people who decide that ambiguous pictures are appropriate for 4 year olds.
I've thought a lot about this over the last few years. In our house, ant has been "bug" also, although apple has always been apple. There are so many cultural factors in picture-choosing also. For example, I've never understood why, as a suburban family, my kids really need to know the different farm animals, and their noises. I'm glad they do, but I wish we could have real-life exposure to things like cows and sheep (stupid zoning laws!) I guess it's a relic from when 80% of families were on farms, or whatever.
ReplyDelete