ohbloodyhell8

The Thursday evening ritual in most homes with elementary age school children includes the final review of this week’s spelling words.  Both of our sons are happily strong spellers.  They get it.  This makes our job relatively easy.  My heart goes out to the parents of children who struggle with spelling.  For some children it just doesn’t make sense.  It may never make a whole lot of sense to them and they will have to learn to trust spell check and find someone to do a really good job of proofreading.

For my sons, they enjoy spelling.  My oldest loves showing how well he knows his words.  He stays very focused during this Thursday night ritual.  He keeps a big smile on his face the whole time.  The only tricky part of the evening is to keep my youngest from being a goofball.  He enjoys misspelling words for fun.  The problem is he might then get them wrong on the test.  So tonight I tried something a little differently.  He got to quiz me.

Oh, he enjoyed this arrangement very much.  He chose words from his chart of word wall words with glee.  After I would spell the word, he would tell me I was wrong.  Then he would say “there’s a z at the end” or “there’s an e at the end”.  With a sweet smile, he’d then shout, “No, you spelled it right!”  This got on the nerves of his older brother rather quickly, but he tolerated it well.  He seemed to enjoy listening to our little spelling bee.

No matter how you review the words, it counts.  My youngest went to bed thinking he pulled one over on me by not practicing his spelling words.  And I let him go to bed thinking that.