Q:  What grade are you in?

A:  I am in 3+2+1th grade.

Q:  You seem to know a lot about English spelling. Have you always been good at spelling?

A:  No. I learned how to spell from my mentor, Goof-up Sara.

Q:  If you had to choose three words to describe the English writing system, what would they be?

A:  Complex, thief, aggravating

Q:  Do you have a favorite word? Why do you like it?

A:  Deoxyribonucleic. I like it because it looks weird but when you look at the parts it starts to make sense.

Q:  If you could change how schools teach spelling, what would you change?

A:  I would change how schools teach sounding it out. The first thing to do is show how history changed how we pronounce words.

Q:  Along with learning about how history changed how we pronounced words, are there other things we can do to help us with English spelling?

A: We can do a lot of things. Here are two:

• You can take words and find bases, suffixes, and prefixes.

• Look for common things in word families. An example of a word family is actually the family of “family.” “Family” is related to “familiar” and “familiarity.” They are all spelled similarly and mean similar things. They all start with <famil>. If you don’t know how to spell a certain thing in one of them, you can look at another one and use that as a base-off.

Q:  Tell us something else about you. Do you have hobbies? Pets? A friend you want to tell us about?

A:  I have two pet cats named CC and Murph. They love to read and play, and CC can open doors, and Murph loves water.