All About Homophones is the latest release from Marie Rippel, publisher of All About Spelling. If you have read my previous review of All About Spelling then you will remember that I do not have enough words to tell you how much I LOVE the curriculum. True to the spirit of All About Spelling, All About Homophones is fun, creative, engaging and designed to reach children in the way they learn best. It is a breath of fresh air and wonderful supplement for any language arts curriculum.Homophones, in case you have forgotten, are those wonderful, tricky words of the English language that sound the same, but have different spellings and meanings. For example, “read” and “red”; accidentally use the wrong homophone in your writing and your sentence can take on a whole new meaning. I was never aware as an adult of the frequency of homophones within American English until I had to teach my first child to read. All About Homophones covers 99 pairs of homophones including a second look at “to, two, too” . The book is designed to assist students in grades 1-8 in grasping the intricacies of the English language.
In addition to age appropriate worksheets for homophone review, Rippel has included graphic organizers for students to keep track of the meanings of new homophones, crossword puzzles, classic card games like “Pig”, “Snap” and “Old Maid”, student record sheets for personal homophone lists discovered, tongue twisters, riddles and puns, and a mega list of homophones. All About Homophones is not a curriculum to be conquered, but a wonderful, fun-based educational resource to be pulled out time and time again. The publishers recommend the book for grades 1-8, but I think even high schoolers could benefit from occasional review with this handy resource.
All About Homophones is available in e-book format for $27.95 or traditional printed format for $29.95 on the All About Homophones website. The e-book format, of course, arrives as a PDF immediately to your inbox and allows you the opportunity to print the worksheets and games which most appeal to your family. I am still a bit on the fence with e-books being an old fashioned pen and paper type of girl. I did spend an afternoon printing out the e-book format of All About Homophones, however, and am happy to report it printed clearly without a hitch. You will want to be prepared with a three hole punch, binder and lots of paper to feed into your printer if printing your e-book as I did. All About Homophones is over 240 pages long! This is a tremendous resource!!
Sample pages are available on the All About Homophones website along with a very fun tool, the Homophone Machine designed to stimulate interest in homophones with kids, but also give adults a peek back into the confusing world of learning to spell the English language. Simply enter a sentence into the machine and click on the convert button. My sentence was “Regenia read the red book while the knight rode his horse to the castle one night.” Converted by the Homphone machine this sentence became, “Regenia red thee read book wile thee night road his hoarse two thee castle won knight.” Scary isn’t it? But, oh so fun!
To celebrate the release of All About Homophones, the publishers are offering readers of this review $10 off any order at http://www.all-about-homophones.com/! To receive the discount, visitors to the site need to enter "FUN" in the customer code box during checkout. The coupon code is good for one week, through February 2, 2009.
If you are still doubting whether homophone study can be fun I would like to leave you with one more thought from the All About Homophones website.
QUESTION: Why did the baker quit making doughnuts?
ANSWER: He got tired of the hole thing. :-)
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