old

[Paisley Hedgehog]

nm

[Shay]

I hear you, Shari!! I found these two to be really boring. I did well on the exercises and surprised myself. However, I'm content with just knowing our language has lots of other influences...I don't particularly care about the specifics. I do believe that a bit of this is necessary to guard one from believing our language is impossible..... "crazy English" sort of mentality. I hear that all the time from ps teachers that I work with.

 

I did find it a nice reminder that when working with dyslexic children (I assume older dc) it is helpful to give them a bit of the background so they can get a sense of how rich and full of history the English language is.

[LizzyBee]

I haven't done these lessons yet, but I've been listening to The History of the English Language from The Teaching Company. Parts of it are boring, but other parts are really fascinating. For example, the Indo-European languages and Latin/Romance languages have certain sounds that are analogous, such as p-f and t-d. So foot and ped (as in pedestrian) aren't as unrelated as they seem. The author gave lots of examples like that. I feel like the course is just skimming the surface, and I want a deeper understanding; yet I don't think I could bear the tedium of a more in-depth course on the topic.

 

I wonder if being able to share these kinds of things with my dyslexic daughter will help her understand the sometimes hidden logic of the English language, and if so, will it improve her spelling?

[Paisley Hedgehog]

nm

[merry gardens]

These two lessons explored the origins of the English language and told us that yes, Virginia, English is a rule-governed language. :)

 

The lesson traced English from its origins as Celtic to Anglo-Saxon to Norman French and Latin/Greek influences. These lessons also talked about the standardization of English through the printing press.

 

After the whammy of Lesson 6, these two lessons were a bit of a let-down for me. I am *awful* at word roots and analysis, so this is definitely an area where I need work.

Yes, these two lessons didn't cover nearly as much as the last two lessons, but they were still very interesting and particularly helpful to me in planning for the next school year.

 

I continue to discover that the later parts of O-G programs duplicate what I try to do earlier. That may be part of my frustration as a homeschooling mom--I expect them to do something before they are ready. This year, my 12 yo (who is probably mildly dyslexic) has been working with a vocabulary books based on Latin and Greek prefixes, suffixes and roots, (Words on the Vine.) This has been a source of strife. I see now that book would have fit better with advanced levels of O-G programs rather than where we are at right now. I had been planning to focus even more on vocabulary next year. I think we'll go ahead and finish that book; however, now I will wait on any further Latin/Greek based vocabulary study until we've finished all 10 levels Barton.

 

I want to cover the material presented in one of these lessons as a history lesson with my children at some point. It could help to show them the "big picture" as our language ties in with historical events. We just started new history books that were created to develop the "big picture" of history by going through major events quickly and marking them a timeline. The material from this lesson could fit in with that somehow, but it probably deserves a separate lesson once we have completed the other program. Hmm..as we get to these events in our other history books, I could point out that the event had an effect on the development of our language. Then at some other point--and perhaps when we are further along in our O-G program--we could do a unit study on the history of the English language.

[ElizabethB]

That actually sounds like an interesting lesson to me!

 

I may watch the course later this spring or this summer when I have a bit more time.

 

For those of you who want a practical, dumbed down version of the different languages that have entered and influenced English, I like Marcia Henry's "Words." It has great spelling and vocab worksheets and is broken up into words of Anglo-Saxon origin, words of Latin/romance origin, and words of Greek origin. In the online samples, there are tables that are especially interesting, click on the introduction, table O.1 on page vi and table 0.2 on page viii.

 

The sample is from early in the book, it gets more challenging at the end.

 

http://www.proedinc.com/customer/ProductView.aspx?ID=989&sSearchWord=