PSIA

Today we spent all day at the PSIA district academic meet. Avery competed in creative writing and spelling, and was awarded 4th place in spelling. We are so proud of her! This is the first time she's every done anything like this -- including taking a test of any kind! The test was composed of 50 words; 80% of the words were from the word list given ahead of time and 20% were completely new words. She learned the entire 600 word list (and they were hard words, like magnitude, galactic, and xebec). The only word from the list that she missed was serious, which she spelled 'sirius' (like Sirius Black in Harry Potter!). The other ones she missed were all new words (including psychiatry -- which I can barely spell). I'm just so impressed that she was able to figure out how to study. It took me a year or so into college to really figure that out!

Oh, the bonus was that she got a crash course in traditional schooling all in one day: she was dropped off in a classroom full of people she didn't know, the hallways were loud and chaotic, she had a kid try to cheat off her, someone pulled the fire alarm, we had a tornado warning, and the principal threatened to take away everyone's "electronic devices" because apparently kids were sending nasty messages between the schools. It was quite a day! All we needed to finish it off was a bomb threat! Avery was so funny about the cheating; she told Bill, "The teachers even told them not to look at other people's papers, and they STILL did it!" LOL, poor naive Avery. ;-)