My fourth grader has a homework assignment that he needed my help on. Naturally I am baffled. The assignment is to find the homophone pairs in a quote from famous people.
My understanding of homophones is that they are words that sound the same but are spelled differently. Words like sea/see, write/right, etc.
I cannot for the life of me find a single homophone in this boy’s list of quotes. Maybe its a trick question?
Examples:
“Kids need to hear that if they put in the work, the results will be there.”-Michael Jordan
“A lesson worth learning is that whatever your life’s work, do it well.”-Martin Luther King
Please help…I’m not finding homophones in any of these quotations. What am I missing here?
Directions: circle the homophones in each quotation that famous people offered in response to a request for advice for kids. Then write the homophone partners for the circled words.
Another quote: “Sons and daughters, remember this: There’s no credit taken for our talents. How talent is used is what counts.”-Madeleine L’Engle
What am I missing here?
Am I supposed to be finding homophones within the words themselves, like in the Michael Jordan quote “hear/there”? Or across the multiple quotes instead of homophones within each individual quote?
Ah wait…I get it now. We are supposed to find words that have homophones and figure out what their homophonic partner is in our own. OK, that makes sense. Geez. The directions could have been worded differently. Any time I think of those I am looking for pairs immediately.
This means to find words in the quotes that have homophones, circle them, and then write the corresponding homophone. It’s a poorly written assignment, I’ll agree. I have sent notes to my kids’ teachers more than once when I see ambiguous or unclear assignments. These people are communications professionals; there’s really no excuse for it.
Sons and daughters, remember this: There’s no credit taken for our talents. How talent is used is what counts.
No, in the Jordan quote, you’re supposed to circle “hear”, since it’s a homophone, and then below that write “here”, which is its partner. The assignment isn’t to find both partners in each sentence.
If a word in an example sentence has a homophone partner in the English language, circle it. Then write the homophone partner(s).
Like so:
“Sons (Suns) and daughters, remember this: There’s (Theirs) no credit taken for (four) our (hour) talents. How talent is used is what counts.”-Madeleine L’Engle
And you might be able to get away with what (watt).
Not in my dialect… is there a reference book that expects this assignment to be done with respect to a given dialect (even just a particular dictionary?) because otherwise your kid might be marked down for making or ignoring choices based on dialects.
Like there’s a Y sound before the “oo”? The dictionaries I checked listed that as an alternate pronunciation for both “due” and “dew”.
Also “our” is sometimes a homophone for “hour”, sometimes for “are”, and sometimes doesn’t quite sound like either one.
Good catch. I didn’t think of that one. Now I’m sitting with my legs tightly crossed.
I thought of that, but ultimately rejected it. The common senses of “put” and “putt” aren’t homophones in any accent I can think of. Is there a sense or accent where they are?