Wednesday, February 4, 2009

The crazy English language

We had a day like this today....
Yep, it was a bit of a crazy day. The English language is such an insane language to learn when it comes to reading. We have been learning about homophones. Those lovely words that sound the same but are spelled different with different meanings. Like the words red and read, or led and lead. Evie is getting the homophone thing. It's words that are supposed to have "rules" and then the rules change that get to her. Like words that have two vowels like the word "rode". The rule is that the e at the end is telling the o to say it's real name. She got the hang of that completely, and was doing great...until she starts seeing words like "love" and "come". Okay, so that "e tells the vowel to say it's real name" rule just got changed. We had about 20 of those changing em up and not following the rules words today. The book called them sight words. I call them pain in the neck words. Then there are the words that have the exact same spelling, and different pronunciation. Like read and read, lead and lead. We had a bunch of those today too. The book didn't even attempt to explain why in the world we have words that spell the same but are different. She finally just looked at me like this whole thing was just crazy. I don't blame her one bit!

5 comments:

April said...

LOL - the whole thing IS just crazy! Who in the world made it so confusing anyway?

I love Evie's crazy-cute picture too with pencils stuck in her ears. I think I'd want to stick pencils in my ears after such a lesson too! Hahaha!

:)

SchnauzerMom said...

I've heard that the English language is one of the hardest languages to learn. Probably because of all the things you mentioned.

Evie is so cute!

Daisy said...

I know what you mean!! My son has trouble reading and follows the rules that I give and then I don't know what to say to those words who break the rules I just taught him. :oP
Evie looks cute ...lol!

K said...

Oh gosh that's so funny, but my english teacher in school told me english is the hardest language to learn. Way to many rules that have too many exceptions.

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