English - Page 5

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Some Bits and Pieces…

The other day I was looking at a letter Gemma-Rose had written to a friend. It was long and detailed and her spelling was almost perfect. “When did you learn to spell so well?” I asked. Gemma-Rose shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. I do read a lot, you know. Maybe I remember what the words look like.” Well, she must have read many ‘ought’ and ‘aught’ words because I…
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How the Girls Are Going to Write Novels in Only One Month

 The girls can’t wait. They’ve been planning for weeks. There’s only seven days to go…. until… NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. I heard about this yearly online event on Kari’s blog, Overflow, last year, when she announced her intention to write a 50 000 word novel in one month. Write a novel in only one month?  Could I do that? No way. But then Suzie Andres said…
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A Main Course of Reading Out Loud

This morning we took a trip into town. While Imogen and Charlotte had piano lessons, the younger girls and I made the most of our waiting time, and did some grocery shopping. It was gone 11 am before we arrived back home. We carted all the shopping bags into the house and unpacked them, before putting on the kettle. A few minutes later, I sank with relief onto the sofa…
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Homeschooling Heidi

“Can we have another chapter of Heidi, please Mum?” begs Sophie. It’s the third time I’ve been asked that question today. “If you make me a cup of coffee and get the book ready, I’ll be there in a minute.” The girls rush off. They can’t wait for another instalment of this story. I can’t wait either. I was ten years old the last time I read Heidi. I’ve forgotten most of the…
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How Younger Siblings Learn by Listening In

On Sunday Father S began his homily: “In Hamlet, it says, ‘To thine own self be true’.” Gemma-Rose dug me in the side and whispered loudly, her eyes wide with excitement, “Hamlet!” We are halfway through reading this Shakespeare play and Gemma-Rose couldn’t believe Father knew about Hamlet too. Later around the table, while we ate our Sunday cereal and crumpets, we had a good discussion: “Which character said, ‘To…
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A Little Unobtrusive Help with Reading

 Many years ago, I taught my first child Felicity to read so quickly and easily, I was sure I was a brilliant homeschooling mother. What was everyone else doing wrong? Teaching a child to read? Easy!  Or so I thought.  Then Duncan came along and the word ‘frustrated’ became part of my everyday vocabulary. He could remember the sounds of letters, but running them together to form words was a…
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Handwriting Matters or Maybe it Doesn’t

Some of my children have beautiful handwriting and some don’t.  “What are you going to do when you go to university? Your tutor won’t spend time trying to decipher your essays. If he can’t read them, you’ll fail.”  My eldest children went to university. “Handwritten assignments aren’t accepted, Mum. See, I didn’t need good handwriting after all!”  So I was wrong. Times have changed. Good typing skills are now more…
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Learning about Punctuation the Lewis Carroll Way

I never used to bother with the finer points of punctuation because I wasn’t sure how to use such devices as colons and semi-colons. For a long time, I didn’t even know their proper names. To me, they were two dots, or a dot and a comma. And I’m supposed to be an educated woman. But one day, help arrived in an unexpected way.  I started reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice in…
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Listening

  Gemma-Rose’s turn to read. My turn to listen. When I was an eleven-year-old student, our teacher got out her tape recorder and played us a current affairs radio program. It was a hot summer’s afternoon, late in the day, and I felt sleepy. I didn’t even try to concentrate on the program.  I spent the half hour I should have been listening, daydreaming instead. Apparently, almost all my fellow students did the same thing. And the teacher must…
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The Rose Round – children’s fiction

I have just finished reading Meriol Trevor’s  book The Rose Round to Sophie and Gemma-Rose. They were enthralled with the story from the very first page. So was I!  The book description on Amazon doesn’t say much at all:  Young Matt Rendal’s first experience with the extraordinary inhabitants of the great crumbling house called Woodhall was terrible. What had he done to deserve being sent here?  I don’t know if I…
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Wanting to Learn How to Spell

Gemma-Rose isn’t a defiant child so when she said to me, “You can’t make me learn anything I don’t want to learn,” I stopped and listened. We were talking about spelling. Did Gemma-Rose want me to enrol her in an online spelling program? “No thank you, Mum.” “Well, how will you learn how to spell?” “I’ll pick it up as I go along,” she answered confidently. “But wouldn’t it be…
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A Novel Writing Adventure

Imogen is sitting in the family room with her netbook balanced on the arm of the sofa. I look over her shoulder and notice she is writing a blog post…. another one. She always seems to be writing. The other girls also spend a lot of time tapping away on their computer keyboards. All my children love writing and I wonder how this came about. Did they see me sitting…
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