A great thing about being a newly appointed literacy coach is that it converges my professional and personal lives.

This week, I determined that a student had sufficient exposure to the three sounds of ‘y’ and decided to move on to the digraph ‘-oy’. Shrewdly realised that I could already introduce this digraph to the son because 1) it sounds like ‘Oi’ and is thus easy to remember, and 2) he proudly proclaims himself as ‘Mummy’s Boy’, so he is knowledgeable of at least a word that ends with ‘-oy’.

So given how action-oriented I am, I made various letter sounds and blended them with ‘-oy’ to get him to utter words like boy/coy/Roy/soy/toy. Actually, just focusing on sounds makes the idea of teaching less daunting. I don’t have to teach him what ‘coy’ means; I just need to train his ears and mouth for now so that he will learn to read it when the occasion arises.

Being able to apply something that I used at work gave me the push to do a Google search. This was when I found out that contrary to my thinking, ‘soya’ is not a misspelling of soy beans at all. I can’t remember which Japanese friend gave me the wrong impression - maybe it was my wife - but there you go, ‘soy’ and ‘soya’ are both acceptable spellings for the beans. Am I not a lifelong learner, heh?