English is a very complicated language. Many English words, due to their roots in a variety of languages such as French, Greek, German, and Latin, are known to be exceptionally hard to spell and pronounce correctly. Sure, as homeschoolers we like to entertain the idea that there are actually English spelling and pronunciation "rules" that […]
Archives for January 2012
How to Teach Descriptive Writing with Show-me Sentences
Descriptive writing doesn't come naturally to most writers, especially to children. That ability usually has to be learned. As you know, children tend to tell, not show what is happening, so their writing ends up sounding more like a newspaper article rather than a story. As parents and teachers, we often struggle with how to […]
How to Catch Common Misspellings in Writing
This morning my 9-year-old was working on editing some sentences where she was looking for errors and correcting them. I noticed she tended to overlook some of the more common errors, such as misspellings of it's/its, your/you're, two/to/too, there/their/they're, and whose/who's. She knows how to use each of the words the proper way, but catching […]