A while back I wrote about how Jane was unwittingly honing her spelling skills while crushing me at iSketch. This time it’s Rose, who will be seven in August. She wanted her own email account and has been gleefully firing off five or six notes a day to me, Scott, and Jane.

Dear Mommy I am more afraid of flies than lions.

She wants to do it all on her own: I mustn’t look over her shoulder. After a day or two, she disclosed to me her method for figuring out how to spell words she doesn’t know: she looks through books until she finds the word she wants.

“When I find it, I copy it down,” she explained.

I asked how long it takes her to find the words she wants. She isn’t using a dictionary for this; she is turning to her favorite novels and picture books.

She shrugged as if the question was hardly worth considering. “I just think of a story with the word in it and I find that page.”