Category Archives: Spelling & Handwriting

Well, the blog must have content. While going through my bookcase I came across this, spelling & handwriting schoolwork I did as near as I can remember back in 1991. Never really paid much attention to this book because you know, how interesting could it have been? Turns out there are some good bits…

As you can see this is an artifact of better days, when an advertisement depicting an armed robbery, re-enacted with crunchy chocolate caramel candy bars was still considered appropriate for the cover of a primary school exercise book. Note that I managed to miss-spell ‘spelling’ on the front cover, which I think is quite an accomplishment on its own.

The exercise book is split into three sections. We’ll go through each, starting in the back.

So in the back are just basic spelling exercises, bunch of words are dictated and you try to write them down. Get some right, get some wrong, pretty boring stuff. Moving on.

In the middle of the book are the handwriting exercises. These exercises would be written on the blackboard or on a pre-printed sheet, I can’t remember which was the case in this class, but as we’ll see that might have been a pretty important detail.

The exercises are simple form and letter repetitions to train muscle memory, each one also had a few sentences to copy as well. Each day they moved up in alphabetical order. I know, this sounds horribly mundane. Let’s just jump in and read one:

Every evening Eve and Emma went to Ellen’s place for dinner.

Oh, well good for them. Nothing strange about that. Let’s carry on…

Freddie Fender fiddled furiously with Fiona’s fiddle on Friday night following half time.

Nice one Freddie, I bet Fiona enjoyed that.

Gerry grew grapes in Gina’s garden greenhouse.

Sure he did. Gerry loves gardening…

Johnny Johnson jumped for joy when Justin juggled three jellybeans at June’s party

Nothing dirty going on here. It’s just in your head.

Larry licked Lisa’s lollipop while Louise leered at Lana.

Admit it, you came.

After that the rest of the alphabet gets run down without incident bar a random Asimov namedrop in the V exercise, until one day the letters run out and we start over again with letter pairs. First up is Ab:

Andrew ate Barry’s banana before breakfast in bed.

What. The. Fuck. Seriously, who wrote this shit? How many 10 years old kids copied this off blackboards across the country? Maybe any humor I see in this now is just due to 20 extra years worth of mindwarp, but surely teachers must have been laughing their asses off at this. I hope so anyway.

And then part III. Exercises in which we were given cards with words, and the assignment to create sentences containing them to demonstrate that we understood their usage. Here’s a typical example, written 20 years ago today.

1. He seemed to be immortal for he was the only one who actually survived the nuclear holocaust.

Guess he was pretty pimp.

2. Distribute is the futre tense of distribution.

I spelled fucking future wrong? 10 year old self, I am disappoint.

3. Captain Kirk’s starship is called the U.S.S Enterprise.

Can’t argue with that.

4. The adoption of Earl watchamaycallum was a historical event.

An historical event.

5. He condemned the adolescent to 9 months in prison.

Too bloody right.

6. He was rather immature during the conduction of the campaign.

Dick.

7. But he was very enthusiastic.

Oh well that’s all right then. Except for the part where it’s not, because that’s not a sentence. Oh well.

These exercises were done every few weeks right through to the end of the year, so for the rest of this year I’ll post them on the day they were originally done 20 years ago, and pick on the schoolwork of a 10 year old. Me.

And that’s my shitty filler blog content sorted for this year! Some of the entries are more entertaining, others less so if you even consider that possible at this point. If anything else interesting comes along I’ll let you know. Maybe.