Spelling Lesson?

For the most part, I have always liked Language Arts. I love grammar and spelling, and too often, I find myself proofreading things (yes, I’m one of those!). It makes me shake my head and tisk, tisk, when I find a spelling mistake or verb tense inconsistency in an article or novel. The jury is still out for me on the whole new lingo and increasingly acceptable “incorrect” language stuff in today’s modern electronic world. There is a part of me that thinks it is fun to write/type in a casual, conversation way, with a few incomplete sentences and the occasional “bot”, “gotta” and “foto”. BUT, I do want my kids to learn all the proper ways of language, spell things correctly and learn what prepositional phrases and hanging participles are. They can save the "cool" language for cutesy notebooks and sparkly gel pens, and I guess texting :p

ANYWAYS, that wasn’t really what this post was supposed to be about. I should really quit babbling about something I am not really qualified to babble about. Do you know how many teacher family and friends we have? LOTS!

THEREFORE, back to what prompted this post…I’ve been teaching the girls Spelling. That, combined with us experiencing a new language here, has revealed some interesting things.

~ Never realized before how much we speak in clichés and “expressions”. Try translating “This tool makes pruning trees a piece of cake” or “Emery is a Jack-of-all-trades” or just plain old "That's cool!"

~ Spanish vowels, and many other things in the language, are so nice and consistent. 5 vowels: a,e,i,o,u and each one makes the same sound EVERY time. I cannot even begin to count how many different vowels sounds English has. AND, (girls, never start a sentence with "and") you pronounce every letter in Spanish. There are very few, except maybe 'h', silent letters. Don't even get me started on all the silent letters in English.
caught
fought
weigh (okay, I got started, but I'll stop there.) Oh, and get a load of this English word:

PHOTOGRAPH

It starts and ends with the same "f" sound, but not an "f" to be found in the word.

~ Yes, there are a few words in Spanish where the same word can have multiple meanings, but English is a real pain in the butt in this area (another expression hard to translate!). Macy's Spelling Lists (Grade 5) lately have been a real eye-opener...Homographs and Homophones. Now there's some gooders!! Homographs are words that have a different meaning when you put the stress on different syllables:
rebel
conduct
record
permit, to name only a few. If you stress the first syllable, most of them are verbs (action words, for those of you who aren't Grammar Geeks like me). If you stress the second syllable, they often become nouns (those are persons, places or things). Isn't that crazy? Homophones...we all remember those thorns in the flesh: words that sound exactly the same, spelled differently, very different meanings:
to/too/two
their/there/they're
where/wear
profit/prophet
medal/meddle
bolder/boulder
cellar/seller, again only a few.

~ Rayna's lists (Grade 2) seem like easy words, but have you ever stopped to think how many different ways English creates the sound "oo" as in "zoo"?
grew
blue
zoo
two
to
fruit, but NOT in "build"
And that's just one of probably hundreds of sounds!!!

To sum it up, the girls have verbally expressed, on numerous occasions, how eternally thankful they are that God chose to place them in a First Language English family. They both agree that English must be the hardest language to learn if it is not your first language. In Rayna's words:

I don't know how I ever learned to speak English.

And I was so young when I started!!