How is Queen Elizabeth like a Seattle Winter?
Using homophone jokes to sweeten up the complexities of English spelling
One of the things I love about teaching is how much I learn. That’s a truism, I know, but it’s, well, true. I’m constantly inspired and tickled by what my students write and say, and working with kids always pushes my horizons as a human. You probably know the feeling.
But I also learn things. Like spelling. I came out of my education knowing and using a lot of words I couldn’t spell. Like intellegent. Intelligant. Intelligent! That one gets me all the time. I don’t have a problem with this as a teacher, as it give me a chance to model using dictionaries, and to model that we’re always growing as writers.
The logic of English
But over the last decade, I have to say, my spelling has gotten so much better. I give credit to working on spelling with my students, using the book Uncovering the Logic of English by Denise Eide. This book systematically goes through all the rules of English spelling. Not the sort-of rules like “i before e,” but carefully worded actually true rules. Like “English words don’t end in I, J, U, or V.” Which explains things like the silent e’s in “love,” and “blue” among a zillion other things. (And shows us that “spaghetti” is a borrowed word.)
I was pointed towards this book by the parent of an engineering-brained kid, whose favorite phrase was “fun fact!” and who didn’t like things with lots of open-ended vagueness. This book has a wonderful orderliness to it.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with spelling.
This year, we’re going through the book’s main rules. On the way, we’ve tried to get creative. For instance, looking at the 28 ways to combine our five (well, seven with Y and W) vowels into our fifteen vowel sounds, we tried to untangle our minds with some humor. Yes, you can spell the same sound many different ways, but that means something awesome: homophones. And where there’s a homophone, there’s a dad joke in the making.
So we got busy coming up with jokes about farmers beeting everyone in races, bears without shoes, deadly sleighs, and many other things.
My personal favorite:
Why are Frog Hollow kids always walking in circles?
Because Becca always tells them, “go write!”
Thank you very much.
But what about that queen?
So why is Queen Elizabeth a Seattle winter? Any guesses?
Well, they both reign/rain for a long time.
I’ll see myself out now.