When he was in first grade, his teacher sent home a kind of word jumble exercise. It was a list of letters and a kind of triangle of squares. Students were to use the letters to make a two-letter word, a three-letter word, a four-letter word, and so on until they used all of the letters listed. It was very frustrating for my child.
My solution was to put the letters on index cards so he could manipulate them like Scrabble tiles. Side note: I now cannot solve Wordle without using Scrabble tiles, so perhaps this technique was as much for me as for him.
It was easier to be able to move the letters around on the table and not just in his head. I would sit next to him and encourage him. I would never give him answers, but I might help with spelling or pull out a dictionary.
One of these puzzles was particularly challenging. He got all the smaller words, but when it came to using all the letters, he was very frustrated. He had the building blocks of the smaller words, but they didn’t connect to make a natural word or phrase.
His father was also frustrated. I did not have my own set of manipulatives, so I was trying to unjumble the letters in my head. I came up with what I thought was the solution before my child. However, I was baffled. We knew this teacher well. She had been my elder child’s teacher as well. The answer was bizarre and unlike any of the other earlier solutions. This was the end of April and we had a good sense of these weekly word puzzles – or so we thought.
With some gentle support and an occasional hint, my son arrived at the same answer I had come to earlier. He knew the phrase because we frequently played a musical version of H.G. Wells’ War of the World at home. The big phrase, which used all the words was death ray. Or so we thought.
My child didn’t think much of the solution. Rather, he was delighted to be done with his homework. I was confused, but a little happy that the teacher was using a science fiction reference, even if it was obscure and odd.
You already know where this is going, I am sure.
He took his homework to school the next morning, the morning of April 22. When he came home, we got a big lesson in anagrams. The solution was not death ray, although that did work with the letters. Who knew that a perfect anagram for death ray was Earth Day?
Earth Day and death ray and this story of a clever word exercise are now forever linked in my family.
Happy Death Ray – I mean Earth Day!
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