My 7th grade son has made huge gains in reading and spelling and functions as an “A” student in reg. ed, BUT has horrible trouble when writing(actualy typing) with choosing the correct homophone. They walked over THEIR is typical of what he writes and of course spell-check doesn’t catch most of them. Their/there, hear/here, etc; he knows what he wants to say, but always chooses the wrong spelling. How are these taught so kids can really learn them? Thanks!
Re: how to teach correct homophone use for 7th grader
Bookmark this website and have your son use it as part of the editing process when correcting his own work.
http://www.confusingwords.com/
Re: how to teach correct homophone use for 7th grader
His problem is that he doesn’t know he has used the wrong homophone-he’ll read it aloud to me and it sounds fine to him. When I have time and proofread his stuff, I catch them and point them out, but he can’t seem to catch them himself.
Re: how to teach correct homophone use for 7th grader
Spelling Through Morphographs addresses this by combining spelling with a definition. For example, the instructor says something like “Spell the tale that means a story,” followed by “Spell the tail that means the end.”
To do this without the program, you would probably want to introduce no more than one set of homophones per week or two-week period. Work on them orally, and also with writing — preferably more than once a day.
This is a long, slow, gradual teaching process.
Nancy
Re: how to teach correct homophone use for 7th grader
Nancy-thanks-he could probably spell them with the definition but it’s the encoding part, that is coming up with the correct homophone in connected writing that’s so hard to teach.
Re: how to teach correct homophone use for 7th grader
Agree totally with Nancy.
When I have a student who does this, I don’t just correct the error, and I don’t just tell the student what is wrong either. I drag through the whole socratic process: What is wrong here? What does this word mean and why? Which of these words are you trying to say? Besides teaching, this takes so much effort that the student would rather avoid it and so he thinks ahead after a few times (motivation).
I teach word relationships also:
they —> their, changing y to i and adding r
they’re = they are, dropping a and putting apostrophe in its place
there = a place; note it is “here” with a t in front of it
here = a place, here and there
hear - has the word “ear” in it
your = belonging to you, adding r, they — their, you —>your
you’re = you are, dropping a and putting apostrophe in its place
its = belonging to it as in me-my, she-her, you-your, it-its; no apostrophe used on pronoun possesives
it’s = it is, dropping i and putting apostrophe in its place
and so on.
Nancy is right, a long slow learning process. Slow but sure wins the race.
Just spent an hour again today with a kid who does this same thing in French, and was allowed to do so for seven years, three hours a day … an uphill battle unteaching but we persevere.
This doesn’t answer your actual question…but I think that my son’s Franklin Spelling Ace gives definitions for homophones to help the student choose? If he can keep handy just a short list of problem words, he can always do one last check on those that appear in his assignment.