Friday, July 23, 2010

Contractions are easy to teach if you have the right tools;)

Ok, coming from a house of reluctant spellers, I have to say that to teach contractions wasn’t that hard. We all use contractions in everyday life from texting, emailing and even when we are talking to someone else. My kids have no problem saying the contractions, but were a little confused on what stays and what goes when you add two words together.
I first started by giving these two definitions of contract and contraction.
Contract Definition: To draw together. To shrink or shorten.
Contraction Definition: Pulling together two words dropping one letter or some letters substituting an apostrophe (a comma that hangs in the air) for the missing letters.
Then I made up flash cards for each of the most common words that we use... can not becomes can’t and do not becomes don’t. And so on, we made a memory matching game out of these to play which was both fun and a great memory lesson. Next I made them write out simple contractions like..... I + am =,You + are =, She + is =, because with my kids it is necessary to have many different hands on experiences as possible.(and its good for their writing practice) Lastly it was time for fun learning time, and guess what? I found online contraction games that goes over everything that I just taught them! I love the Internet and the wonderful people out there that make my homeschooling life easier.

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