Not until I began to teach my oldest how to read, did I realize how confusing the English language was. She was having a hard time , at first, with it and who could blame her.
We start out by saying a,e,i,o,u are our vowels. Then we learned a little song about the vowels. Simple enough. Then she learns that vowels can say two different things, they can be long or short. Long vowels say their name, short vowels......well....don't. So we start with short vowel sound and begin our three letter word families. There is the "at" family, and the "et" family the "ot " family the "it" family and the "ut" family.
Okay, so we are doing good. So then we start adding rules. When we have an "e" on the end of the word it turns that vowel to a long vowel sound. That vowel now says its name. So then we learn words like "brave" and "lake" and "like" and "make". She is a little confused at this point but still hanging in there.
So now we add another rule. "When there are two vowels together the first vowel says it's name and the second one says nothing" Next she asked the question "well then why is it there?" I said, "it is a helper............a silent helper" She said, "well if it doesn't say anything then it doesn't need to be in there. So why is it there?"................."it just is okay! It's a rule. Rules are made for us to follow" Now, we move on from that to the words "neat" "sail" "meat" and "goat"
Then we move on to words such as "say" and "snow" and I have to explain to her that in our "vowel song" although it wasn't mentioned that sometimes "y" and "w" are vowels.....and so in the word "say" the "a" is long and the "y" says nothing. You could tell by the look on her face that she wanted to ask once again, "then why is it there" but she did not.
We move on to the next rule, "vowels by themselves say their name" and then we learned the words "go" and "so" and "he" and "she"
Then I write this sentence on the board "We have to go get the goat." She, with much confidence and remembering all of her "rules" reads it "We have (with a long "a") toe go get the goat" when I tried to explain to her that "to" is not read as "toe" and she said, it's a vowel by itself so it says its name" and then I said well not in this case, and that "have" doesn't have the long "a" sound and she said, "well it ends with an "e" which makes the "a" say it's name. I said , " that is true, but not with this word"
After that we tried it again with the next sentence "I have read a book to my pet." She is ready to go now, she saw the "to" and remembered what I said, and starts to read. "I have (with the short "a"sound ) read (with a long "e") a book to my pet" She is so proud of herself at this point until I tell her that with this sentence the "e" in read is short not long. "but mom it has two vowels together the first one says it's name and the second one is silent" to which i reply "well the word 'read' can be read in two different ways"
This went on for quite sometime and she was bringing up some very good points. So at this point we just agreed that "to" says "to" and not "toe" and "have" has a short "a" sound and "read" can say two different things and the rule for that is "It just does and that's the way it is so...learn it"
She isn't going to make it through " 'i' before 'e' except after 'c' " and that "to", "two" and "too" sound the same but mean three different things. And the ever important yet hardly used (which drives me nuts) is the difference between "there" , "they're" and "their". And just wait until the day that she learns that spell check cannot correct this sentence " I wood love two give sum hugs too my mom"
Maybe we should have started with pig latin........
No comments:
Post a Comment