Part of our Spelling Series: Oy, Oi, Those Diphthongs! diphthong – A complex speech sound beginning with one vowel sound and moving to another vowel or semivowel position within the same syllable (Webster’s II, 1984). Somehow it helps me a little that the definition of a diphthong uses the word “complex?” Because that word sounds…
Author: Diane Pendergraft
The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton
“. . . a real life of anybody is a very difficult thing to write; and as I have failed two or three times in trying to do it to other people, I am under no illusion that I can really do it to myself.” And really, what he wrote isn’t in the style we…
Clerihews
I haven’t finished reading G.K. Chesterton’s autobiography yet, but, as usually happens when I read nonfiction, one thing led to another. In the chapter on his boyhood and school days, Chesterton mentions: “The first of my friends, with whom I fought in the field, has since written the best detective story of modern times and…
The Next Step: Blended Families
Part five of our Spelling series: Blended Families You’ve been working with your child on the single-sound consonants and the first sounds of vowels. He knows that most of the e’s on the ends of words are silent but busy. He’s wanting to know how to spell everything and trying to read signs and cereal…
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
The podcast version of this review can be found here. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I like books about people who like reading books! However, the beginning of this one wasn’t encouraging. Jacobs starts out talking about Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, and I started out thinking, “Oh,…
Let’s Get Started
Let’s Get Started I’ve established that simply telling children, “English spelling doesn’t make sense, just learn it,” doesn’t work for me. I have also asserted that teaching phonics is essential. After my foray into a bit of the history of English, someone commented, “Fine, but I still don’t know how to teach spelling.” All right…
How Came We to Spell Thus
Part of our Spelling Series: How Came We to Spell Thus? Something to keep in mind in the midst of the “exception” frustration with English spelling is the fact that “way back when” (not to be too specific) there were no silent letters. All of the letters are there because they were pronounced at some…
The Jungle Book
23 years! That’s how long it’s been since I first read Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. That was the first year we homeschooled, and I was casting about our home library for literature I could teach from without having to buy curriculum at the last minute. My father-in-law had admired Kipling, and my husband had…
A Severely Abbreviated History of English
Part of our Spelling Series: “The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like.” – Pygmalion, Bernard Shaw The other day, my daughter (who is just now beginning to homeschool her first-born) and…
War Horse
“I shall not call him my master, for only one man was ever my master.” Two books have made me cry in front of my class while reading aloud. One was Little Britches, the other was War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. It’s not that I only cry about horses. It is the suffering of innocent…
Stepping Heavenward
This is part of Diane’s Literature Course II series. “Much of my experience of life has cost me a great price and I wish to use it for strengthening and comforting other souls.” I never go into our public library without checking out their discard/donation rack first. That’s where I got my practically complete “Great…
On Teaching Spelling
I have a confession, and I hope you won’t hate me for it . . . Spelling is easy for me. I started first grade in 1968. They weren’t teaching phonics. It didn’t matter—I already knew how to read. Everyone else was working their way through Sally, Dick, and Jane. What I remember about spelling…
A Person of Ability
I just finished reading Ben Hur, by Lew Wallace. For the third time. I’ve always been mildly curious about the man who could and would write such a story. This time I decided that I was curious enough to actually dig up a biography. Based on the stories in the first chapter of Lew Wallace:Militant…
Teach Them to Learn
In the middle of a phone conversation with my oldest son the other day, he said, “Oh, Mom, I’ve been wanting to remember to tell you something. I want to thank you for teaching us how to learn.” What? Huh? I’m choking up already. “Young people these days (he’s 33 and already complaining about the…
The Eagle of the Ninth
I finally read Eagle of the Ninth, after seeing it on lists for years, because it is in the Veritas Press Omnibus I, which I am teaching through this year.