Spelling

I really lick arithmetick But spulling makes me Vurry sick.

Children of the Code
 * ...[in English] "we have fifty some sounds and only twenty-six letters. So we have to adopt a whole variety of mechanisms to close the gap." - **  **[|Dr. Richard Venezky],** A uthor: The American Way of Spelling: The Structure and Origins of American English Orthography

[|http://www.childrenofthecode.org/Tour/index.htm]

Watch the videos entitled "The First Millenium Bug" which is about how English developed and why we have so many spelling rules and so many exceptions to those rules.

In Imaginative Education, it is suggested that story-telling is a good way to engage students. Every word in the English language has a story--it's called "etymology," the history of words.

Most spelling books have students learn a group of related words each week. One way to supplement this is to look at words that share etymologies. For example, look at words that are from the Anglo-Saxon part of English or words from Greek or Latinate words. There are some really interesting stories about these words. Because the French were the conquerors in 1066 of England, the French portion of our language is the "uppity," "academic" style of English. Because the Anglo-Saxons were the conquered, the words from their vocabulary are "earthy," and "lower class."

More information on this is below:

[|http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Terms/latinate.html [[http://www.english-to-french-translation.com/translation-articles/english/translation-article-anglo-saxon-latinate-words.htm] ]] []

What to do with this?

My dad studied Medieval English and Linguistics, so when I was growing up and would ask him what a word meant, I would get not just a definition but also the etymology and significant uses of the word across history. That's how much he loved language.

I believe that when students know WHY words like "phonics," "phone," and so forth have a ph for an /f/ sound (they were borrowed from Greek and in Greek were spelled with the Greek letter phi), they will be more likely to remember the correct spelling. In other words, the story of the words, told in vivid terms, helps students to remember the logic behind the spelling. No word in English is spelled randomly--there is always a reason for the way a word is spelled. When we give students the reasons, then they are not just memorizing seemingly random information which is the hardest type to remember.

Where to get etymology?

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What I learned from my dad is that words are really interesting. I believe if that message can be communicated to your students, they will be better spellers because they will appreciate what the language is and how it has changed over the millenia.