What the ----?

Rachel is my sometimes sweet, sometimes naughty 1st grader. She has a fabulous teacher that tries to keep her in line during the hours that she is not with me and I am keeping her in line.

I love her curriculum for 1st grade. Each of the kids has a notebook and each week they have a new letter and number and for their homework they have to create a page for that letter and number. She also gives a few guidelines. For example, they have to write the letter upper and lower case each 20 times. They have to have a border to their page and it has to be in color. They usually have to think of an animal that starts with that letter and either draw and label it or write a fact about the animal. A few times she has wanted them to do word lists. For the letter "g", they had to have a list with words that use the "hard g" sound and words that use the "soft g" sound.

This week they are on the letter "L". There were the usual requirements: write the "L" in both upper and lower case, think of animals that start with "L" and write a fact about them, write 5 sentences about things you love ("I love..."), and write as many words as you can think of that have double consonant L in them. Like: pillow, smell, etc.

Maybe you can see where this is going....

Rachel had a great list of words. She wrote: well, tell, will, bell, fill, call,pillow, shell, sell, spell. And then she showed my expert parenting skills with her next word. Can you think of what it was? Oh yeah! She wrote....hell.

I said, "Rachel honey, you can't write a bad word on your homework. Think of a different word please."

And then I walked away and laughed.