We're doing some English grammar and mechanics almost as an afterthought this year. I had thought to work with grammar mainly through our study of Latin, but as Oscar (3rd grade) begins to do more complicated narrations and compositions, it's become obvious that I need to give him some basic mechanics instruction. I haven't really found a curriculum I'm thrilled with yet, so I'm doing a lot of it on the fly.
This morning I grabbed a workbook off the shelf and took it with me to Hannah's intending to teach formally how to spell the plurals of English nouns. Then when I opened it up and started to read the material to him I realized it was kind of crappy. The list of rules was poorly explained — for example, Rule #4 was "when the word ends in f or fe, change the f to a v and add es" but Rule #7 was "when the word ends in f or ff, add s." Obviously these are not "rules" in the sense that you or I understand the word! So I tossed the workbook aside and went off-the-cuff. Here is what I wound up teaching Oscar:
"The first thing you need to do when you want to spell a plural, is say the plural noun in your head and hear how it sounds. Tell me, what's the plural of 'cup?'
"Cups."
"What sound do you add to the end of 'cup' to make it into more than one cup?"
"Sss."
"Right." I wrote in his notebook: Listen to how the plural sounds on the end. "When you hear yourself add a 'sss' to the word, you know to write it with an ess on the end." I wrote, Cup->cups.
"How about the plural of 'rug?'"
"Rugs."
"What sound did you add to the end of 'rug' to make it plural?"
"Um, zzz."
"Okay, when you hear yourself add 'zzz' to the end of the word, you spell that with an ess too. You know that zzz is sometimes spelled with an ess. Especially at the end of a word." I wrote, Rug->rugs. "Okay, now, what's the plural of 'dress?'"
"Dresses."
"What did you add?"
"Uz… iz?"
"Yeah, something like that. When you hear yourself add 'uz' or 'iz' to the end, you spell that bit with an ee–ess." I added that example to the list, and then took a minute to write a list of words down the left side of the paper: cop, glass, bush, patch, stomach, yolk, itch, bridge. "Write these plurals."
He took only a moment, muttering to himself, and spelled them all right: cops, glasses, bushes, patches, stomachs (ha! if he'd followed the rules in the other book he'd have written 'stomaches!' I rule!), yolks, itches, bridges.
"Great! OK, now we have to talk about the weird ones. Let's start with these." I wrote a short list: day, boy, way, key, joy. "Go ahead and show me how you'd make these plural." He quickly wrote days, boys, ways, keys, joys. "That's right; these words that end in a-why, e-why, o-why follow the same pattern as the others. It would be the same if there were any words that ended in i-why or you-why—"
"But there is," he said, "buy."
"OH! You're right. Like, 'I got some great buys at the store yesterday.'" I added it to the list and then continued. "But other words that end in why follow a different pattern." I wrote a short list: fly, sky, puppy. "It doesn't matter if the why says I or if the why says ee. You don't just add an s, you have to change the why to an I-ee." I wrote flys, skys, puppys, and crossed them out, replacing them with flies, skies, puppies. "No reason. That's just the way it is with why-words in English." I made another short list for him to practice on.
"There are still a couple more weird patterns to do. First has to do with words that end in oh." I wrote tomato, potato, piano, patio. "Some of these need an ee-ess, others need an ess. You just have to memorize. I wrote tomatoes, potatoes, pianos, patios. "The only rule of thumb I ever learned was that if the word has anything to do with music, don't add the e. But it's not really ever obvious — see, 'patio' doesn't have anything to do with music. If you don't know how to spell the plural of the word, can you think of a place you could look to find it, or to check if you were right?"
He guessed a couple of different things before he hit on the dictionary. (Then he sighed. I make him look things up in the dictionary far more than he would like.)
"Here's another weird pattern." I wrote "shelf" on the page. "Make that plural."
"Shelfs?" he said slowly.
"Try using it in a sentence."
"'I put the books on the shelves. Shelvvvvvvvves." He frowned at me with his mouth open. "It's got a vvv in it!"
"Yeah, and we write it like this." I wrote 'shelves.' "See? You've got to listen."
Tomorrow I'll tackle irregular nouns. I think my way was lots better than the one where you say "if the word ends in the letters sh or s or z or x or …" — quicker for one thing, more accurate for another (see 'stomach.'). Still, I think I'll have him generate a table in a couple of days, where I list all the English phonemes, see if he can come up with a word that ends in each sound, and then see if he can spell the plural correctly.
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