Spelling Utensils

Last night I was out to dinner with my family and my little nephews. The older nephew is getting into spelling and he asked me to ask him words that he would try and spell.  We started with stuff around the table. Like 'spoon'. My nephew started spelling spoon with a 'C' and I told him it was an S. Ssss... Not C. He said, 'But sssseee is C.' And I said well C is more like Cuh... and he said he thought Cuh was for K. Kuh. And I was like... well... kuh-inda.

I realized he had a good point but then brought it back around to the S. Spoon starts with S. I said. 'Spuh... spuh... ' He said, 'P! S P!' Then oooh. O! S...p... o!... ummm... N! I could see in his eyes that he was so sure that Spoon was S-p-o-n. It makes sense! I felt bad having to correct him about it. I told him how spoon has two O's. Because it's spoooooon... extra O's for extra oooh. He looked at me like, 'WTF? Extra frickin O? Two? Like I how the hell was I supposed to know friggin extra O? That's out of left. Sup with that?' But he finally got it and was like ok 'Spoon'.

The next word we did was 'Fork' He pretty much nailed that one except for replacing the K with a C. Then he corrected himself after I gave him the 'almost' one eyed squint. He was psyched up for getting fork without too much discussion. Fork was easy for him. After fork he had that coolio glimmer in his eye like.. I get it! Words! This isn't so hard. There's a logic to it. All the letters make sounds. And if you put the letters in the right order it will make the word! Easy. It was cool to see him in the process of learning.

Then he confidently said, 'Ok now I wanna do knife!.... N... ' I didn't even see it coming even though it was next in line for the utensils. It was upsetting for me to even think about getting into the right way to spell knife right on the heels of his big fork victory. I didn't even know where to start to explain the K situation Actually I don't really understand it myself. Luckily the salads came before I had a chance to get into it and a minute later he spilled his shirley temple all over the table so knife was easily backburned after that.

ok bye!

tOdd