March 21 marked World Poetry Day and to celebrate we’ve chosen poetry for this month’s Word for Wednesday theme. The word poetry dates to the late-fourteenth century and comes from the Old French ‘poetrie’, from the Latin ‘poeta’. Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at the words sonnet, limerick, and villanelle. Today’s word is haiku. A haiku is a three-lined Japanese poem made up of seventeen syllables, with five syllables in the first and final lines and seven syllables in the middle line. Haiku often describe the natural world. The word haiku was first used...
Expose yourself to as many new words as possible If you want to expand your vocabulary, it is important to actively expose yourself to unfamiliar words. One way of doing this is by reading as much as possible. As long as you focus on building your vocabulary, you don’t necessarily have to read books. From food packets, to road signs, to Buzzfeed, we each read a huge variety of words as we go about our day to day lives. We also expose ourselves to words by watching television and online videos, by listening to the radio or podcasts, and in conversations. Try to be conscious of the information you are processing. When you come across a new word, see if you can work out its mea...
Here at Spellzone, we encourage our students to learn spelling using as many senses as they can. By learning in this way, we are able to connect as many associations as possible with the spelling of a particular word. These associations should help trigger our memories when we are trying to remember spellings. So how we can be aware of the five senses when learning spelling? SIGHT When learning a word, LOOK closely at it. Then cover it up and try to remember how the letters are positioned on the page. Picture your own handwriting and the way the letters look beside each other. Sometimes if you spell a word in a few different ways, one of the spellings will LOOK more familiar than...
If you struggle with spelling – you’re not alone. One of the reasons why English spelling is so difficult is because of how inconsistent it is. This week we’re looking at the long /e/ sound and the seven different ways of spelling it. Please note the pronunciation of some of the example words may vary depending on accent. Just the letter e In some cases, the long /e/ sound is spelled with just the letter e. This is usually the case in words that are more than one syllable long, but exceptions include some very common words like ‘me’, ‘be’, ‘we’, ‘he’, and ‘she’. This spelling of the long /...
As English is spoken in many countries worldwide, it’s moot to argue that there is only one way to pronounce a word. Take the word ‘route’ for example – here in Britain, we pronounce it ‘root’, while in America it is pronounced ‘rowt’. Even within Britain, regional accents mean that the same word can be pronounced in many ways! Because English has evolved from a variety of different languages, you can’t consistently rely on the spelling of a word to figure out how it’s pronounced. As soon as you learn a pronunciation rule, you’re presented with all the exceptions – just take a look at the following ‘ch’ wo...
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