Down to the wire

It's Friday morning...

Spelling Bee eve if you will.

It's 9:30 and I am about to roust Maya

out of the warm, comforting,

spelling word free nest

of her safe little bed.

We are taking the day off of school...

that is to say,

we won't be doing Lang Arts

or math, or history or geography...

no science or foreign languages.

Just spelling.

But first,

I want to share the wonderful success

that was our Writing Workshops.

In one word,

these two groups were AWESOME!

We worked on acrostic poems.

An acrostic poem is as follows:

               C   urious

               A   ttitude

               T   rouble

You take a word,

write it down a page,

then come up with something to describe

that word starting with each of its letters.

This is an acrostic poem I received

from one of my kids.

M    ad over writing

R     ight about everything

S     weet

W   onderful

 I     ntelligent

N    ice

G    reat at everything

I didn't even pay her to write it,

honestly, I didn't.

Okay...I did make her brownies,

but I'm pretty sure that had nothing to do with it.

Here is one of Scotty's acrostic poems.

C   ool car, fast and slick

A   cool blue and T-tops

M   y Camaro it is

A   nd small

R   iding in it is awesome

O  wesome it is

They actually wrote more than acrostic poems,

but those tend to be favorites.

And, yes, I do know that awesome is not spelled with an o.

It's still an 'owesome' poem.

Here's another poem Scotty wrote about his Camaro:

C   ool car, fast and cool

A   Camaro, yes it is

M   y Camaro is cool and fast

A   nd slick

R   iding in it with the tops off is fun

O  h how I love my Camaro

I'm thinking that Steven will be in a lot of trouble

should he ever decide to sell this car.

So...

I received lots of gifts,

(totally unnecessary, but so very sweet all the same,)

a bunch of cards,

(many of them handmade which is the absolute best)

and more hugs than I could count,

(which was by far the most wonderful thanks I could

ever hope to get.)

Here's one more poem written to my by another

sweet child:

Thank you for teaching us this writing today

It has all been so fun,

hip hip hooray!

Thank you for taking your time with us kids

We all thought we thwacked our heads with tin can lids

I hate that its time for us kids to go

but the more that we write, the more that we know

I just love this!

One more thing from the workshops...  

this was from the third week when we did comics.

This is a strip that Scotty filled in.

I dare say that if this doesn't make you smile,

there might just be something wrong with you.

Okay...

and back to spelling.

This is what I've been looking at for the last month...

lists like these with pronunciations scribbled all over them

so I can say them correctly.

The 1,150 new words she has been learning,

(on top of the two to three hundred words she'd already mastered,)

for the past four weeks include Latin, Arabic,

Asian, French, Slavic, Dutch, Old English, 

New World languages, Japanese, Greek,

Italian, Spanish and, 

(pictured above,)

German.

There is also a list of eponyms,

which are names derived from a person

or a mythical creature.

These are some of the words Mylee will have to spell tomorrow:

renaissance

guillotine

tchotchke

galjoen

prosciutto

Speaking of which...

my little speller,

(who last night told me quite emphatically,

"I have a serious spelling angst going on here!

Angst, A-N-G-S-T!"

That is actually one of her spelling words...)

finally rose and came down,

tempted by the smell of freshly baked

cinnamon rolls,

and we will now begin our day long review.

12 hours and counting....