There are some words that are just hard to remember how to
spell, and if they sound the same as each other, it simply compounds the
problem. I’m all for using images to help myself remember stuff, so let’s be
kind and do the same for our kids! Here are a few of the tricks I used with my
students when teaching these three words.
The Contraction “They’re”
Here's
a visual that you could show your students. Point out that the two guys on the
left are drawing attention to the two short people on the right. The sentence
under the stylized word shows
the relationship between “we’re” and “they’re,”
both derived from a word combined with what used to be “are.” I shared the
story in another blog about how contractions came to be. Maybe a quick brush-up
of that story will suffice to drive this concept deep into memory! Notice that
in the sentence, the “’re” and the “are” are both light blue to tie the two
together.
The Location Word “There”
Location
words “here,” “where,” and “there” all have the word HERE in them. You can do a
goofy
sort of “who’s on first” using these words. Mom says “Come here and get
your sandwich!” Child says, “Where?” Mom replies “There!” Note that in the
picture, each here in the location words is light blue to tie them together in
memory. In order to help young children remember the -ere spelling, I would say
that the location words all end with a sandwich. The e's are the slices of
bread and the r is the baloney in between the bread. You could teach this by
drawing a simple crust around the e's like this:
The Possessive Word “Their”
For some reason my students always had a really tough time
remembering how to spell “their” and remembering when to use that word versus
“there” or “they’re.” When teaching "their," I used a little sentence
and the following mini story and drew the action on a white board. Worked like
a
charm! Here's how the story goes...There were two kids, who one day discovered
that there were little evergreens growing up all over their backyard. When they
asked their father about it, he explained to them that the pinecones that fell
from the trees made new little trees. The thing is, they’d not noticed before
because the mower always got to the little trees before they’d had a chance to
grow big. This time, however, the mower was broken and the grass hadn’t been
mowed for a while. So of course the kids didn’t want Dad to mow down the cute
little trees! But after a bit of discussion, a compromise was reached: kids
would choose the nicest tree they could find and plant it in a safe spot in the
yard. Then Dad would mow the lawn. And that is what they did. The kids watched
over their fir tree carefully and after a while it grew to be much taller than
they were! How proud they were! When other kids came over to play, they made
sure everyone knew the fir was theirs. I pointed out to my students that
“their” and “fir” both end the same way. As a matter of fact, if you take the
words “the” and “fir” and put them side by side, then erase the ‘f’ at the
beginning of “fir” you will have the word “their”! Try it! I promise it will
work!
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