Last Wednesday, 11-year-old Geniya sat in a corner of the library at Ockley Green Middle School in North Portland, where she’ll be a sixth grader this fall, intently concentrating on spelling the word “prince.”
It’s a deceptively tricky word. The “ce” combination at the end could just as easily be an “s,” the “i” in the middle could perhaps masquerade as an e and it’s not unreasonable to assume that there is a “t” hidden in the middle, a la the word “prints.”
Geniya tried out all three of those mistakes, using magnetic tiles on a white board to spell “prents” before squinting at it critically, and swapping out the e and the t, but leaving the s in place. Next to her, Cathy Parker — a reading interventionist at Woodlawn Elementary turned adolescent literacy tutor for a session of summer school — reminded her about the phonics of a so-called “soft c”: When paired with an i, like city, or e, like prince, it sounds like an s, Parker prompted…