Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Words Mean Things

I respect that.

And I also have know, intellectually, for a very long time that English is a very difficult language to learn.

But let me say this: I get it now. I really, really get it.

My child is very literal and things like homonyms and homophones? Yeesh. Things are getting even more interesting over here.

Wait. Did you know there was a such thing as a heterograph? I didn't until Google just told me.

Let's just throw that in there, too, just for giggles.

Need a chart? I did.

Sometimes it's funny and other times I just want to wave the white flag, pull the Ds card, and yell, "NO FAIR!"

No, really. I'm already wanting to ask for an exemption. Y'know, like, from everyone in the world. How the heck do you teach this?!

Here are a couple of examples:

Playette is great with her sight words. It's really her strong suit. She took those Rainbow Words last year and ran with them. She was done with the project in January.

But now it's time to start spelling.

She can look at the words "too/two/to" and read them correctly all day long, but when I tried to teach her how to spell "to" and only "to", I realized that we were going to have a problem.

I don't have a solution.

Do any of you?

No, really. I'm clueless.

Just so I don't stress too much before bed, here's a cuter example.

It tickles me every time.

See, I put my hair in a bun a lot. So, one day not long ago I did the same for Playette. I had done it before, but had never given it a name. For whatever reason, I filled her in and said it was called a bun...asked if she liked it. Did she feel pretty?

Her face screwed up a little while she looked in the mirror and tilted her head in confusion.

"What's wrong?" I asked her.

"Bun," she replied, "but no hot dog?"

Thank you! Tip your servers.We're here all week month.

I'm not even going to talk about signing and jargon today. My head would go boom. But I have before, in case you're interested. Clicky-clicky here.

1 comments:

Michelle said...

I didn't realize, or remember, how difficult the English language is to learn until Kayla was in 3rd grade. (1st and 2nd grade ELA she was in the sped room and wasn't exposed to that gen ed curriculum stuff, but that's another story!) She did get "STEP" cards from the 2nd grade gen ed classroom for teaching phonics and they had rules on the back of them. I still haven't memorized the rules on the back; and now Lucas has them.
It's a wonder how any of us learn how to spell and differentiate the written language and meanings with all the rules and all the exceptions to the rules.
We had such a fun time last year trying to learn how to make words plural - when to add an 's', or an 'es' and when to drop the 'y' and add 'ies.' We must have blocked all of that out of our memories once spelling became second-nature.