The biggest news of the week was the food poisoning I came down with Tuesday night and that I am still recovering from. Luckily on Monday night when I was babysitting something happened that was related to our class.

As I mentioned in class before the little girl that I babysit for had an assignment last week to write a paragraph using her spelling words. What I learned this Monday is that the class is told to practice the words five times each as an assignment prior to writing their paragraphs. I was very impressed with the mothers approach to this task ; instead of making her daughter write all of the words, she lets her paint them. This takes a good ten minutes longer than it would if she were just writing them but it does make the homework enjoyable.

I am not sure painting the words has any benefit other than fun wise, but I do think that the teacher assigning spelling-related homework is a big step in the right direction. I believe in class we established that the norm of teaching spelling was to give the words out out Monday and not talk about them again until Friday. Perhaps there is hope for learning spelling yet.