The title says it all. This week's prompt from Tara for
The Gallery obviously had me thinking about photos of DD - so much to be proud of there. On the other hand, when you're handed such perfect material you'd have to be pretty stupid not to end up with a lovely, happy, beautiful three year old. And I write about her a lot - obviously as this is primarily a Mummy Blog. So I started to think about other things in my life that I'm proud of.
In the end I chose the thing that took me the longest time and required the most amount of work. And, after being an academic C+ all my life, I finally, at the age of 38, got myself an A grade. Granted, it's not a very exciting photograph but I'm very fond of it (the paper not the picture of it).
This is the soft copy of my MA dissertation. There are a couple of hardback copies somewhere in the Intitute of Education, London University library but I couldn't afford another hard copy for myself. It's called:
Reading Preferences of Bilingual Children - The Implications for the General Promotion of Reading. Basically it hypothesises that if bilingual children prefer reading for pleasure in one of their languages over the other (where the children are equally proficient in both languages, the two languages hold equal status and suitable books are readily available in both languages) and we can isolate the factors that encouraged the children to make their language choice, we will have a valuable tool towards promoting reading for pleasure among children generally.
The feedback from the examiners included the recommendation that I should get my findings published. I was so chuffed I promptly did nothing about it and it's sat in my bookcase gathering dust ever since. However, the real irony is that having discovered how to teach reading more effectively, getting the MA enabled me to leave school teaching and teach at college level, where all my students can already read. Remember
the Peter Principle? I'm living it.
I missed last week's Gallery which was called 'breakfast' although I have posted a picture of my breakfast in recent weeks. And last year there was a Gallery theme called 'morning' and I did that one too. This week the Gallery theme is '8pm'. I had to wait until 8pm tonight to take this one as it was Yom Kippur today so no photography since sundown last night. There was also no nursery and nothing open to go and visit (unless you're a 3yo who loves to visit synagogues) so we spent most of the day at home. I would have spent more time outdoors with DD on her scooter enjoying, along with loads of other kids, the fact there are no cars on the roads today. However, it was more than 31 degrees and I was fasting (as one does). Whatever... 8pm came and DD went out like a light. :o) What a great way to start the year!
