You Say Tomayto, I Say Tomahto: An Intro to American Dialects

This week we are learning about dialects in Frog Hollow, American dialects in particular. We started by talking about how many different words there are for the same thing, and how people from different places speak English differently, and how they are all “right.” Then we took a class survey.

I asked them a whole series of questions:

What do you call the plastic nipples that babies use? Pacifiers? Binkies? Dumdums? Plugs?

What about those bugs that blink? Fireflies? Lightning bugs?

How many syllables does the word crayon have?

And many more. It was fun to see whether or not everyone had the same answer. Sometimes we did, and sometimes we didn’t. This makes sense, since we all live in the Seattle area, but our families came from many places.

I got the questions (and a list of common results) from the Harvard Dialect Study, although I think an easier compilation of what looks like the same info is the survey results from the Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes. Even more interesting, is the Dialect Survey, which I found floating around on Facebook, where you answer 25 questions and they tell you where you’re from.  They nailed it for me — guessing two of the towns I lived in as a small child.

This was a lively, excited class activity that underscored an important idea: language is fluid, personal, and place-based, and while there may be a standardized way to write English, there are many ways to speak it.

The Lists Game

Humor is a great teaching tool. That is one of the reasons that games can be such a great way to learn something. One of my favorites is the Lists Game. It is a pass-the-paper game, along the same lines as Exquisite Corpse, but instead of making crazy stories, it makes silly lists. Because you only have to write one or two words at a time, it is a great one for very slow/early writers, especially for older children who struggle with physical writing but love a good laugh. And even though it is not a huge amount of writing, it gives children an experience of writing being a doorway into fun. Here’s how it works:

1. Each person takes a piece of paper and writes the title of a list at the top. It could be anything from “Zoo Animals” to “Groceries” to “What I’m scared of” to “Reasons I love my mom.” Then everyone passes their papers to the left.

2. The next person adds an item to the list, folds over the title, and passes the paper with just the item showing. For instance, if the list was “Groceries,” a person might write “milk.”

3. The next person would look at that item (in our case, “milk”) and try to imagine what kind of list it might be on. Maybe “Traits of mammals.” Then that person would add another thing that could be on that list. “Hair,” for example. Then they would fold over “milk” and pass it on.

4. The next person would look at “hair” and decide what list that could be on. Maybe “Things that get trimmed.” And then add “lawns.”

5. At the end, unfold the paper and read the crazy list. “Groceries: milk, hair, lawns….”

To hear more of Becca’s ideas for working with reluctant writers, come to her free talk.

Exquisite Corpse

Exquisite Corpse can also be played as a drawing game. Photo credit: Hydra Arts

One obstacle that keeps children (and everyone) from writing is their own perfectionism. Frustrations with spelling, Saying Something Important and Getting Things Right can freeze kids up.

I like to approach this problem in two ways. One is to make the work I ask the kids to do be real and beautiful and meaningful — worth being perfectionistic about. (More on this another time.) The other is to make it completely unimportant. In other words, to make it a game. 

Games are a great way to instigate lots of quick writing. Because speed and craziness matter more than perfection, a kind of pressure lifts off and pencils start flying.

One of my favorite games is a classic we call Exquisite Corpse, which is the name the Surrealists had for it. It works like this:

~ Each person gets a piece of paper. They write a title for a story or poem (you can play with either in mind) at the top. For instance, The Worst Day at Frog Hollow.

~ Then everyone passes their titled paper to the person to their left. That person reads the title, and adds the first line. For instance, “Everything started out great, but then we discovered a dragon had eaten our socks.”

~ Then everyone folds over the paper so that only what they wrote is showing and passes it again. The next person can’t see the title, because it’s folded under. They can just see “everything started out great, but then we discovered a dragon had eaten our socks.” They add the next line: “Oh no, I cried, what do I do without socks?”

~Everyone just keeps folding, passing, and writing until all of the papers are full.

~ Then they unfold them and read the crazy stories.

The best stories have just a little bit of continuity to them, so I encourage kids to write at least a full phrase. Being handed a paper that just says “Noooooo!” leaves the next writer without much direction. If there is a kid who does not write fast enough to keep up, I have them sit just before me in the rotation and dictate their line to me.

This game is popular both with my elementary classes and with my teens.

For more of Becca’s thoughts on overcoming writing challenges, come to her free talk on Sparking Reluctant Writers.

Working with Challenged Writers

Learning to write is hard work for most children, but for kids with learning differences it can be especially difficult. Often with those children, there are a few aspects of writing that lag far behind their general understanding of language. Maybe their spelling looks like some kind of code. Maybe they don’t read yet. Maybe their writing is painstakingly slow, or they struggle to translate their thoughts onto a blank page. This can be incredibly frustrating to these bright minds.

 At the same time, they might excel at other elements of language arts. They may compose beautiful poetry, be tongue twister whizzes, memorize long poems, make up corny puns, or find profound meaning in the stories that they hear.

While helping them master the parts of writing that challenge them is essential, I think it is also important to encourage them to explore language through other channels. I believe that many of the skills that children learn through language arts can be absorbed even by a child who cannot read or write very well, and that giving a child with learning challenges avenues to explore language skills outside actual reading and writing is crucially important.  It helps them be motivated to on the hard parts. It also keeps their minds from being held to the lowest common denominator of their skills.

For instance, if children read below grade-level, they may not be able to read the books that really interest them, but they can listen to them orally, either through audiobooks or by being read to. While this does not teach them to read, it does strengthen their oral sense of how sentences should sound. You don’t have to know grammatical rules to write a correct sentence if you have a good ear. When we work on grammar in my class, I present the sentences both in written form and orally, and the students who are not yet reading or writing much usually hear mistakes and are very astute about how to fix them, and this skill is based entirely on their oral language exposure.

Likewise, having a strong oral vocabulary will translate later to having a strong written and read vocabulary, and vocabulary is also built most naturally through hearing stories.

Children also do not need to be able to read a story themselves to understand the deeper literary meaning inside them.  We read for practical reasons, but we also read because humans need stories. We are meaning-making beings and finding symbolism and meaning within literature enriches us. Luckily, all of this can happen through oral stories as well.

In short, while learning all reading and writing skills are important, exposing children to rich language does not have to wait for their other skills to develop.

To hear more ideas about working with challenged writers, check out my upcoming free talks about sparking reluctant writers.