Bananagrams

We played a few rounds of Bananagrams with 10 yo. He always ends up being a rotten banana: parts of words hanging, made-up words, misspelled words. I noticed that 8 yo kept stopping him and correcting his words. 8 yo does not play; too much pressure. I kept talking up how he seems to be quite good at spelling now and he might want to give it a try. He reluctantly agreed with me. He made a bunch of three letter words, and it was hard adding other words to them. I stopped my game and helped him out. He breathed a sign of relief when we used up all the letters in his pile.

Today, I told the boys that we are going to restart doing Chumash ( I took a break during Pesach). 8 yo said that we have mainly not been doing anything, so it is time to start a lot of other things. I asked him, what else? He said: spelling.

I almost fell over.


Then there was an evening game of Bananagrams. I could not play with both boys at the same time, and 1 yo was very cranky and very ready to go to sleep. Bottom line, I messed it up badly, by totally creaming all involved parties ( including my husband). 10 yo was on 8 yo's team, and 8 yo was in tears. When I finished, he said that he's so bad at this, so bad.

And then he swiped across the table and scattered the tiles.

10 yo had no problem scrambling all his tiles mid-game and coming up with this monstrosity

I am not holding my breath for spelling for tomorrow. But now I have evidence that he at least knows when the word looks right and when it needs to be fixed.