Lost In the Prairies.....Found by God

My daughter has started grade 1 this year. I was excited about this, not because I was down 1 child 5/7 days a week, but that she would be starting to read. I can't wait to see what she will be reading and what kind of books she will be drawn to. I still get chills when I hear her reading her leveled readers ( The elephant is big, The horse is big,.....).

However, this week Nicole brought home something that I had purposely pushed from my mind - her first Spelling List. Now it was pretty easy (an, and, am, at, a). I had her practice every night this week and tonight I gave her a mock test, which she aced! She told me it was "easy peesy" (I need to stop letting her watch the Naked Chef with me).

In school I dreaded the weekly spelling test. I hated spelling. I have recently heard that people who are bad at spelling are just "lazy." I wasn't lazy. I studied. I wrote those words out 10 times each. I copied the dictionary meaning of each word to help study. Still, on average I would get at least 3 wrong. Then came this lovely thing called "spell check" in college. I could write a report and then press Ctrl F2 (I preferred WordPerfect to Word back then) and suddenly it would show me the words I had misspelled and then give me a list of possible correct spellings. Now, even as I write this entry, my misspelled words get underlined and when I right click on my mouse I can get the list of possible correct spellings. However, as a Canadian there are words that I have to ignore because of the "ou" rule (ie Favorite/Favourite). There have been times in my life where I have gotten into trouble with spell check (don't ask me what spell check picks up for Whereas...). But for the most part, I have had a long love affair with spell check.