Right-mouse-click for spelling

From Deb:

The last few days, both Madison and Ella independently have been obsessed with writing on the computer. I got Madison a new computer and printer at the beginning of the summer, and in the last couple of days, despite the fact that we haven't officially started school yet (that's today), she has preferred writing in the word processor to playing games. Ella, too, has wanted to do this on her own computer, and, really, it's independent of Madison, it's not as though she is imitating her deliberately. Ella may even have had the idea first.

One shortcoming of this is that I have had to be fairly close by, otherwise there is Spelling Shouting going on all over the house. "Mom, how do you spell SCHOOL?" one of them might shout while I'm down in the kitchen. I yell back over the sound of the sink, "School. S-C-H-O-O-L. School. There is a silent H in there, so think of it as pronounced "SK- -HOOL."

One thing that Madison can't abide when we're writing The Frontier Team together is the wiggly red line under the misspelled words or the wiggly green line under the sentence fragments that Word deems ungrammatical. Even when I tell her that it's just a proper name that Word doesn't know, or we're doing something for effect so it's okay, she wants me to get rid of that line. So of course she notices instantly when she has misspelled something in her own writing when she's on the conmputer.

I debated about 4 seconds after I thought to teach her the right-mouse-click to fix the spelling. Should I or shouldn't I? Would it just make her too reliant on the right-mouse-click and she wouldn't bother learning to spell? On the other hand, I'm not in the least concerned over her being able to spell well someday, and this way she's noticing what she did wrong (which she doesnt, particularly, when she hand writes something; it either seems okay to her, or she sees it's wrong but it's too late to do anything about it except an ugly cross-out so she lives with it), checking out the possibilities the computer provides, noticing the difference between what she did and the correct spelling (she invariably picks the correct spelling because she recognizes it instantly -- which speaks to the stupidity of the multiple-choice spelling test Laura's tutoring client will be using in her 6th-grade classroom). So, right-mouse-click it is, and she loves the independence. I'm only being consulted at times when the spelling is so far off the mark that the options don't give her the right word (such as when she tried to spell "they" T-H-A).

She didn't want to stop writing even after 9pm last night. She wanted to write in lieu of reading her new (old) Bobbsey Twins book or of having me read to her. Who was I to deny her, I figured. So I let her write until 9:30 and then snuggled with her in bed, but she was so excited by what she was doing (more on that later) that she couldn't fall asleep until almost 10:30.

The other thing that I have noticed about both girls after only a few days of this writing obsession is that they're both getting much better at knowing where the letters are on the keyboard. Madison keeps wanting to use more than one finger, so she's thinking ahead two or three letters and placing her fingers on the keyboard so she can use two or three fingers.

Ella is deinitely much faster than before in knowing where the letters are, too, although she's using just the one finger. When Ella types, though, I really do have to stick close or else she gets stuck on the spelling. Ella doesn't care a whit about the red underlinings, though, and she's content to misspell and doesn't really realize that she has done so. Interestingly, she is more willing than Madison to make an effort to memorize the short words I give her when she wants to spell them, and then type them out from her memorization. (Got. G-O-T. Got. And then she'll go over to the computer and type G-O-T.) Madison is much more interested in me giving her the sounds chunk by chunk, rather than the whole word at once.