Friday, October 26, 2007

How to be a better speller...

Greetings, and Dear Cynthia,

I'm scrambling to show you something knitting related, so here is a sock, all done except for the bind-off....the first of two socks in this pair.... This pair of socks is one of two gifts which I am trying to finish before Christmas so that they may be gifted at that time. It's not exactly an impressive goal in terms of "Christmas knitting", especially considering what others all around me in cyberspace knit during this time of the year. Even so, I'm not sure I'm going to be done with either gift on time...

And, a close-up of the button on my little sock knitting bag, given to me by another knitter, found in Minnesota:
My seven year old has been corresponding with Grandpa via e-mail the past couple of months. Yesterday, I observed him as he was working on a note and adding a PS, then PSS, then PSSS (not sure that he knows exactly what these mean, and actually, I thought the sequence was more PS, then PPS, then PPPS, etc. -- but I'm sure Grandpa doesn't care). It bothers my little guy when there is a red squiggly line underneath words indicating that they aren't spelled correctly, and I watched as he highlighted each of these PS, PSS, and PSSS terms individually, and one at a time managed to "add to dictionary". Voila', the words are spelled correctly, the offensive squiggles gone. I don't know how he figured out how to do this, though we subsequently had a discussion about how in real life, you can't just make words how you want them...and that putting them into your own personal dictionary doesn't actually mean they are now spelled correctly... Anyway, I can understand why his teachers have told me that he is a "problem solver"...

In other news, I had a chemistry quiz yesterday and I think I may have come close to fulfilling the adage, "If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail." I gave myself the week off from studying, and now feel fortunate that we are going to be able to drop our two lowest quiz grades this semester.....

Kids have off from school today, and we have lots to do around the house, so I haven't had to do a whole lot of "peace-keeping" so far... I hope this finds you having a nice day. Also, have a great weekend!

Warm regards,
Laura (YarnThrower)

3 comments:

Designated Knitter said...

I love the spelling! I don't know if you should tell him or not....but the default on our computers at work included "Ignore words in UPPERCASE."
That came back to bite us when we had a couple of forms that were all in uppercase....

SO, if he typed his words all in caps, no little red squiggly line!

;)

allisonmariecat said...

Oh, my gosh! I LOVE the spelling dilemma and his creative approach to solving the problem. Good thing you're addressing it, though, as I'm sure future teachers wouldn't appreciate it ("But the computer says it's spelled right!").

Cindy G said...

Hooray for the problem solver! I do the same thing with K2tog and ssk :)