Friday, March 18, 2011

one of those homeschool mom moments

Either at BHA or around the blogosphere, you've probably seen pictures like this, showing kids working on All About Spelling.
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Grace doing a spelling lesson last fall.

It's a great program that has helped my spelling abilities my kids' spelling abilities so much. Ryne and Grace love using the letter tiles to practice their daily lessons.
If you're not familiar with AAS, you might not know that you have to cut out all the little tiles, attach the magnets yourself, and then save a bunch of them in a safe place for future use. Don't let that discourage you from using the program. It's a good excuse to pop a movie in the DVD player while you have a date with your scissors.
One day last summer Grace decided to play school with her dolls and removed a bunch of the tiles from our white board. Because it was summer, I wasn't spending a lot of time in our school room and things got kind of out of control up there. Okay, very out of control. It took me a week to get everything organized again, and in the process I found letter tiles everywhere. After I picked up the scattered tiles, I went into my bag of tiles stored for future use and found the tiles we'd be needing for the upcoming school year. When everything was set up I was frustrated to find that I was missing two tiles.

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It seemed a little too coincidental that the only two tiles missing were the qu tiles (AAS uses qu instead of just q). For whatever reason, Grace had always shown a lot of interest in the qu tiles. Clearly, she had just put them away for "safe keeping" during doll school. But she couldn't find them. Anywhere. It was kind of a sore spot between us for several days.
Life went on and Grace learned that the letter tiles stay on the whiteboard. But we have gone this whole school year without the qu tiles. Thankfully, they aren't used all that often. I have heard that AAS is very nice about mailing replacement tiles for free, but I never got around to calling to find out if that is true.
This week Ryne got to a lesson that required me pulling out my stash of saved tiles. I couldn't find the needed tile at first so I dumped them all out on the floor. It was kind of fun to peak at the different consonant and vowel teams we'd eventually be using. Then I came across two of these tiles.
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Hmmm. That's an odd consonant team.
As I held one of the nb tiles, I couldn't think of any words with nb. Lots of mb words were coming to mind. Numb. Limb. Dumb.
Then it dawned on me.
I turned the tile upside-down.
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{Imagine my face turning as red as a vowel tile, Ryne laughing hysterically, and Grace rejoicing in her vindication.}
At least I don't need to call the AAS people about my missing qu tiles anymore.

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Have you had one of those homeschool mom moments lately?

6 comments:

  1. ::snort out loud::

    Ooooooh. That was funny!

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  2. We're laughing WITH you, dear - not AT you! :-)

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  3. ROFL! That's a good one, Kellie. Yes, I have those moments all.the.time.

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  4. Lol!! Great application of HC #104. : )

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  5. i think those p's and d's are tricky, too.

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