Ten-year-old Grace has an excellent vocabulary, as do Eli and Lydia, and she uses it in her writing and speaking. (Yesterday, for example, she implored me, “Please don’t scowl.” How much more precise it was than “don’t be unhappy,” which I was not.) The meaning of a word, though, may be more important to Grace than its precise spelling. Here’s a note she wrote and stuck to the refrigerator.
Misspellings prompt my imagination more than correctness does. And this misspelling makes me recall, too, other memorable and wonderful writing mistakes. A few years ago an ESL student of mine wrote a personal essay about her faith in Jesus Crisis.
A stalking Santa and a savior at his wit’s end — maybe there’s an idea in there for a story appropriate to this pressured and frantic time of year.
leaf stitch word 
“Jesus Crisis”! I love it.
This is so lovely to me — because I remember making lists of “ideas” too. As if to say to the parent, “You are kind of an idiot, so let me say that without actually saying it, and maybe writing a long list of things that you can choose from will make you feel as if you’ve had the idea, a kind of christmastime gift virus, and maybe you’ll buy the whole list because you are now thinking you’ve had all these ideas.” Brilliant.