Sharing Amy’s Story: An Update

We are delighted to share Iona’s update on Amy’s literacy journey. You can read more about Amy’s story HERE.

Sarah, Teach Us Too

When we were in the early days of Amy’s legal case, the Paediatric neurologist expert witness described Amy as one of the most severely disabled children in the country. Later on, an educational psychologist expert witness basically said there was little point in us bothering to do anything with her because her brain was so damaged it was at a dead end.

Amy’s health still impacts on her learning and due to hardly having any voluntary movement we have to rely on her only being able to answer yes or no by using a faint head turn or double blink.

We have been teaching her letters and she progressed onto reading simple books but recently her teacher has been offering her the alphabet letter by letter to chose from so that she can spell out what she wants.

This is clearly a slow process, and some messages can take her a few days to compose but I have attached her first 6 attempts at messages to friends and family.

Message 1

Amy wrote this to her Granny. It could be that the first two words together are her attempt at Granny, or she could have been writing Granny Annie (that’s what we call her) the rest is very clear (beortz we realised meant “better”)

Message 2

Amy wrote this to say how she felt having written the first message!

Message 3

Self explanatory

Message 4

Amy wrote this to a friend of hers who is an actress. It was clear she had something she specifically wanted to say and it did take us a while trying to guess what “egkt” meant, but the rest is clear.

The words written in blue below are what Amy confirmed she was trying to say.

Message 5

Black letters are Amy’s choices, blue letters what she meant.

Message 6

Green letters are what Amy meant; seems she may have been trying to say yes to a ‘d’ but we took it as the ‘c’.