So terrible grammatically. Why in the world is that the title?
Sometimes a desperate mother who is pressed for time will look at her son's spelling words, mind scrambling, to find ANY kind of reasonable order or logic to the lesson being taught so she can make it easier to remember chunks of words, rather than having her child recite and write down each word repeatedly in hopes that something sticks.
It's my fault, of course. Things kept coming up and we didn't work on spelling words until last night, and the pretest is today. When I saw those words, my heart fell a little and I began counting. All the words contained either ough or augh. I checked off the augh words in my head (there were fewer of them) and began trying to make a sentence out of them. Then I began to recite it.
Poor J didn't catch it, and kept trying to spell the first augh word within it (wrong, I might add).
I stopped him.
No, you have to remember the SENTENCE.
I repeated it again. He attempted to spell the first word.
No, no, the sentence! These are all the words that are spelled with augh. If you learn the sentence, when the spelling words are called out by the teacher, you will automatically know which one is spelled with O and which one is spelled with A.
With a slightly confused look, J began to repeat the sentence. I realized it didn't make sense, but also remembered it was much easier for me to remember "All Cows Eat Garter Snakes" than "All Cows Eat Grass." Mnemonics that are too logical are actually harder to remember. We began to chant the sentence together.
When he began to attempt to drop the "u" in his spellings, we then chanted "U-G-H, U-G-H" repeatedly in a kind of primal chant way....
I really believe it is likely he'll ace the test. Better yet, I think he'll probably do it laughing.
Tonight I will teach him to spell "mnemonic."
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Comments: 18
Only e's are buried in the cemetery.
Good work, Lisa... and I loved the sentence. Just picturing those laughing cats...
"When you're roaming around in Romania, if you get tired, sit down and give your book-a-rest (Bucharest)."
"There's a great big hole up in the frozen capital city of Finland and the whole thing is sinking down into it... Where is it sinking to? Hell!" (Helsinki)
"Everyone is starving in Hungary... Except the capital city's mascot -- a huge Buddha with a fat tummy -- which sits in the middle of it and eats everything in sight. Frankly, he's making a big pest of himself!" (Budapest)
"Poland is a very aggressive country... In fact, they like to make war on everyone around them but they use very strange weapons that look like saws." (Warsaw)
On the strength of their scores from just that ONE test in junior high, both kids went from D students to B students in geography!!!
Jean....you are too much. I love it!
You sound like a loving mother - and it can be hard to work with your own kids on stuff like this - he is getting it as fast as he needs to - so the spelling test ( a really dumb assessment in my opinion) is secondary to his sense that he can think about spelling - see and remember patterns.
I can't wait for our next list of spelling words. I am SO stealing this wonderful idea. It's just the sort of thing my kid will love. And I suspect it will work.