Sunday Spelling

Tomorrow Rachel will be giving a talk in primary. It's possible we didn't remember to write this talk until after the kids had technically been sent to bed (even though I got a reminder email a couple days ago and it's been on the calendar for weeks) but when I reminded Rachel about her talk she immediately bounded out of bed, found a pencil and paper, and got to work while I was stuck in Benjamin's room singing lullabies.

Her topic is "The Sabbath Day is a Day of Rest and Worship."

She got pretty far on her own. Using the creation story was her idea and she came up with the list of Sunday activities all by herself as well. After I'd put Benjamin to bed I helped her find a quote from The Friend Magazine (from 1975) to beef up her talk a bit (it was a tad short but she wasn't sure what else to say).

When Jesus made the world he did all the work in six days. And on the 7th day he rested. This was the first Sunday. There are a lot of ways to keep Sunday holy. These are some of those ways:

• Go to church every Sunday enless your sick.
• I skip with my grandparents evry Sunday.
• We allso do restime evry Sunday.
• We play family games.
• We do choir.

By doing these things we get closer to heavenly father and our family. Elder Sterling W. Sill said, "[Sunday] is the day when we are expected to live at our best, when we put on our best clothes, read our best books, think our best thoughts, and associate with the people who mean the most in our lives. And after we have laid aside the cares that have concerned us during the other six days, we go to the house of prayer and let our minds reach up and try to comprehend the things of God."

I know that it is inportent to keep Sunday holy. 

In the name of Jesus Crist amem.

My very favourite part (besides the fact that she wrote this pretty much on her own) is that she spelled Skype as skip, so right after she admonishes everyone to go to church every week (unless you're sick, of course) she admits that she skips with her grandparents every Sunday. How hypocritical!

Even she found this funny.

"I just don't know how to spell Skype," she shrugged. "So I think this says skip, but I will know it says Skype when I have to say it."

Her spelling has a long way to go, though she's been pretty good at studying for her weekly spelling tests. She gets twenty words every week but gets to choose whether to do 1–10, 1–15, or 1–20. So far she's always chosen to do twenty, which is good because the first ten words are usually pretty simple. 

This week the first ten words were really only five words with two different endings: -ed or -ing.

On Monday she started doing her spelling homework the minute she came home from school but soon brought her list over to me and asked me what I thought about words 5 and 6. I stared at her list and, truthfully, my brain broke a little. 

talked—talking

dropped—dropping

excited—exiting
lifted—lifting

hugged—hugging

GAH! It's so terrible it belongs on some sort of OCD/Control Freak Buzzfeed list.

"So, what do you think?" she asked. "Is it excited and exciting? Or is it exited and exiting?"

"I have no idea which one it is," I said.

I sent a message to another mom in the class but—unfortunately and hilariously—she answered saying that she had just popped online to ask me the very same thing because her son wrote them down wrong the exact same way!

Rachel did her homework and then I told her she should write a note to her teacher at the bottom to ask for clarification. I considered writing the note myself but then I figured Rachel could write her own note. After all, she was the one who had noticed the problem in the first place. If she really wanted to know which word was supposed to be on her list she could write the note herself.

This is what she wrote:

Dear Ms. M.,

Is it exiting or exciting? My mom wants to know.

Rachel

"My mom wants to know," indeed. So much for not looking like a helicopter parent.

Mrs. M. wrote in Rachel's homework book that afternoon to clarify the list: it was exciting, not exiting.

Speaking of those homework books, what do you call them? Agenda? Planner? Reminder?

Andrew's fairly sure it's not "reminder" but I'm pretty sure I grew up using that word...