hom·o·phone : a word pronounced the same as another but differing in meaning, whether spelled the same way or not, as heir  and air.

If you want a sure-fire way to make a class of kindergarten students laugh you need only say “underwear”, “poop” or “naked”.  This will result in uncontrolled, hysterical whooping and laughing.  We recently added the sight word “but” to our list and that immediately created some wide eyes and giggling.  I had added a “bad word” to our list.  What was I thinking?

We immediately launched into a lesson on homophones. This is a complicated concept for my students because they don’t realize words can sound the same but be spelled differently and mean different things.  We came up with a few together on an anchor chart to help them visualize this.  We will add to this as we come across other words, hopefully not as scandalous as “but” and “butt”.

These class conversations combined with the anchor charts help them make concrete connections to otherwise nebulous concepts.  My students are not experts on homophones now, but they have been exposed to the concept and hopefully, with the creation of the anchor chart, it will cause them to stop and think when confronted with another word that is confusing.

In a recent post, I extolled the virtues of our Explain Everything app. One of my students, Hope, was very articulate in her explanation of her annotated illustration.  Hope was vexed by the whole “but” “butt” issue and wanted to Explain Everything about these words that was creating such consternation in our classroom.  Please allow Hope to explain more:

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