I, Q, take you, U, to be my beloved letter, in queasiness and in quality.
There’s plenty of fish in the sea, and there’s plenty of letters in the alphabet, but Q and U manage to find each other time and time again.
They are a match made in alphabet soup.
There’s quiz, queen, quantity, quintuplets. And on and on. The dictionary is full of words featuring the two letters, and many would net you a big score in Words With Friends.
Kindergartners at Hathaway Elementary in Washougal celebrated the special pairing of Q and U in a wedding ceremony on Tuesday in their school gymnasium, complete with paper formal wear and a walk down the aisle. It culminated with Principal Laura Bolt asking Miss U, Rylee Quinn, and Mr. Q, Wyatt Brannan, to exchange lowercase letters with one another.
For many of the students, the Q and U union was their first look at a wedding.
The flower girls dropped words featuring the two letters, and another class gave a quilt as a wedding present.
“It’s getting towards spring and we wanted to boost the excitement of the letters a little bit,” said kindergarten teacher Sue Conway, who organized the wedding after finding inspiration on a teaching website. The kids started learning about the letter A in fall and are now nearing Z. “It was basically just to show the kids the relationship between Q and U and a hands-on experience they would remember.”
“The kids kept saying the wedding was the best thing ever,” Conway said. Her class spent two weeks planning the celebration: picking music, making paper neckties and veils, and brainstorming QU words.
There’s almost no words in English that have a Q but not a U, save the ones we borrowed from other languages and “qwerty,” the name of a common keyboard layout.
The pairing is a digraph, where two characters are put together to represent a single sound. But that’s a college-level lesson; the Hathaway kindergartners kept it simpler. After all, they haven’t even studied the entire alphabet yet.
“I would definitely do it again,” Conway said. “It was really fun.”
