Ashley burst into tears today because she’s dreading her spelling test this week. The class takes a pre-test every Monday and the real test on Friday. Apparently she bombed the pre-test and dreads the actual test.
Finally, something I can help my kids with. I’m useless when they have math problems, but language arts? Now we’re talking. So we grabbed some notecards and wrote down her 22 words. For the harder words, we came up with silly ways to remember the correct spelling. She kept struggling with the word fifteen because she was mispronouncing it fithteen. So I tied the word to the musical, The Sound of Music, one of her favorites. “Two people sing ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen,'” I told her. “Just like there are two Fs in the word fifteen.” Don’t ask me why I knew that convuluted method would work on her, but it did. By the end of her study sesson with her notecards, she was spelling the word correctly. Now, I hope she retains everything and aces her test.