24th class
meeting, Spring 2005
Class activities: Today the students received spelling lesson in five homonyms: then/than, past/passed, it’s/its, quiet/quite/quit, and loose/lose. They also received a new paper topic to write on for Friday.
Because of the pneumonic devices displayed on the screen, students had visual and aural clues to reinforce their associations for each word correctly.
For instance, Chris displayed diagrams for then & than for them to associate the “e” in “next” and the “a” in “compare.”
N C
T H E N O
X M
T P
THAN
R
E
For “past,” he emphasized the “t” as the difference between “past” and “passed,” the “t” standing for TIME (so they could remember time vs. action).
For “its” and “it’s,” he reminded students to say the two words for contractions (which will help them again in “your” and “you’re.”
For “quiet,” “quite,” and “quit,” Chris put together wonderful graphics with rhymes that associated easy-to-spell words with the more difficult homonyms (e.g. The shark takes QUITE a BITE; QUIET, my wife’s on a DIET; and Don’t QUIT till you get a HIT). The graphics of the shark, the funky looking woman’s legs on the scale, and the baseball player were memorable: the students I worked with in the lab were able to recite them.
For the last set of words, Chris gave them the mental reminder that if something is loose, it might have TOO much material: EXTRA material (and an EXTRA “o”), whereas if you “LOSE” something, you “LOSE” the “o”.
For each of these lessons, Chris presented on the screen first fill-in-the-blanks exercises, one set that they’d all do together, and then a set that they’d do on their own, and then a correct-the-sentence exercise. During the fill-in-the-blank exercises, after the student would answer and the correct word would zoom into the blank, Chris would ask the student to explain WHY he or she chose that particular word (what association he or she made to determine why it was right).
Again, this visual and aural repetition reinforces the material.