Madison can spell

Sometime in the last couple of months, Madison flipped from being someone who can't really spell to someone who can spell just fine.

I'm not sure how it happened. It's not as though she's somehow reading any better or more than she was a year ago; she's as equally obsessed with reading now as then. She's not reading that much more complicated things, not any higher level of nonfiction than a year ago, she reads about 1/4 nonfiction and 3/4 fiction.

It's not as though I have been pressing the spellng issue. We don't do it every day. She's been writing pretty steadily, although even a little less than she was in September.

I can't identify any single element in her education that changed, except possibly that recently I've been doing somewhat more writing on the Frontier Team Book 2 with her sitting next to me.

It really does feel as though she suddenly switched over to knowing how to spell things. She wrote an email note to our nature guide, Liz, on Wednesday. I check things before she sends them out--mostly at her request--and there wasn't a single misspelling or grammar problem.

So, I'm happy, but hmmmmm. It all kind of works in with those learning readiness points I've been noticing, that we have a slow-paced gradual rate of improvement and suddenly shoot up to a plateau. I think I notice these more now than when they were toddlers and preschoolers; then, the new learning rate was out of sight, and while I certainly noticed the milestones, they were closer together and I had already identified them as potential milestones. With Madison, I had resigned myself to gradual improvement in spelling, which has been happening for the past three years. And then, whammo, it takes me by surprise.