Learning to spell

(second post today)

Yesterday Yahaira wrote out the grocery list for us.

I said the word, then she tried to spell it while I broke it down phonetically for her. English is a pain in the butt! I would help her when two similar sounds were blended into one, like the ck in chicken and the tt in butter. Then I would just tell her when there was a silent e like in cheese.

She was figuring out how to spell words the other day on her own and came up and said, "Doll is spelled d-a-l-l." Well, following the logic of adding letters to words to make bigger ones, it should. But to her confusion I told her, "No, unfortunately doll is spelled d-o-l-l. I know. It doesn't make sense but it is. There are just some words in English you have to memorize being spelled weird." She knew that a-l-l spelled all. She did the next logical thing and put a d in front to make a new word. And then there's the word pizza. She was trying to figure out how to spell pizza and said p-e-z-z-a. Again, dumb English words to memorize. This is the only one I can think of that the i sounds like a long e. Yes, I know. Pizza is not native to the English language. But it is a common everyday word, that is so prominent, that you wouldn't think it was Italian, you would think it was American.

So we keep on learning and shrug off the annoyances of the English language. As for math, she was running the show at our yard sale this morning. She counted the items and then counted back the change to the people. I would have let her do everything (add the total), but we were selling our baby girls clothes for a quarter a piece, so people were buying 30 pieces or more each. Trying to add a quarter 30 times without knowing how to multiply would have been a little too much if they people were not willing to be patient. So we stuck to counting the change back to make the amount given.

 These are some shirts I appliqued for our friends who turned 4 this past Wednesday. It had to be done by hand since my sewing machine is on its last leg and was eating up the fabric of the shirts.