It was a sunny afternoon, but the dolls were indoors, doing their homework.
"Can you help me, Mariah?" Jolena asked. "You're so good with words and writing."
Mariah closed her book. "I will if I can," she said. "What do you need help with?"
"Well," Jolena began, "I have to know these words for spelling."
Mariah looked at the list.
Here's the list.
bough
bought
brought
cough
dough
enough
rough
though
thought
through
tough
"They are all spelled almost the same," Mariah pointed out.
"Yes, but they don't sound the same," Jolena sighed. "It makes them hard to spell. I can read them when I see them, but when I need to write them, I can't remember. It's hard enough to figure out what goes with the o-u-g-h for each word during the test, but I want to be able to remember them when I need them for real!"
"I understand," Mariah said. "It's because the English language has changed since the words came about. We don't say them the same as dolls did hundreds of years ago, but the spelling often has stayed almost the same."
"Why do we have to keep the old spelling, then?" Jolena wanted to know.
"Well," Mariah began, "if we kept changing the spelling, then someday dolls wouldn't be able to read books and stories that were written today, like the book Mandy is reading," she pointed out, gesturing to where Mandy was sitting, across from them, "and that would be too bad."
Mariah looked at the list again. "You know the words when you read them, so maybe it would help if you put them in groups and then used each one in a sentence," she suggested. "That way you're working back from what you already know––reading––to what's hard––writing them. Let's group them the way they sound, so it makes more sense. Thought, brought and bought all rhyme, but cough ends differently. Without the 't' on the end of that word, the 'gh' sounds like 'f'. It sounds like the others except for that."
Jolena wrote each of those words down on her paper. She and Mariah checked the list to be sure that Jolena had spelled them correctly.
"Now for a sentence," Jolena said. "I thought I could do a triple flip," she said and then wrote it down next to the word 'thought'.
"Charlotte brought me a glass of water," she said and then wrote it out, too.
"I bought some flour to make some bread," she said as she wrote it out.
"Billy has a cough," she wrote. Then she laughed. It was hard to imagine Billy trying to cough, when he couldn't even open his mouth and only had pretend lungs, anyway.
"That's great," Mariah told her. "Now let's see if there's another set we can put together.
"How about though and dough?" Jolena asked.
Mariah looked at the list. "Those go together, but I don't see any others that sound the same," she agreed.
Jolena wrote out, "Billy doesn't have a fever, though." (Billy with a fever was funny, too.) Then she wrote out, "I need the flour to make bread dough."
"That's good," Mariah told her. "Do you see any other words that we can put together?" she asked.
"What about rough and enough?" Jolena asked.
"Yes," Mariah agreed, looking to see if she could find any others that sounded the same. "I see one more," she said.
Jolena looked at the list of spelling words. "I see it! Tough!"
she exclaimed. "These words have that funny 'f' sound at the end again, even though the letter 'f' isn't in the word! It's like cough, except that the rest of the word doesn't sound the same."
Then she wrote out each word in her notebook. "This spelling lesson is tough!" she wrote.
Then she though for a moment. "I will do well if I study enough," she wrote. After another moment she wrote, "The boats came back home because the sea was rough."
Mariah nodded her approval. "Those are good sentences," she said. "Now let's see if we can group any more."
"It's easier now that we have used some of the words," Jolena said.
Both dolls looked at the list. There were three words left, but none of them sounded like any of the others.
"Well," said Mariah, "let's just do each of them separately."
Jolena thought about bough. "There was a bird's nest on a bough in the tree," she wrote. Then she looked up.
"Good!" Mariah said.
Jolena thought about thought. "I thought this spelling test was hard," she wrote.
The two dolls looked at each other and smiled. "See?" Mariah said. "It isn't that difficult. We just needed to take it in small bites."
"It will be easier when I am through studying," Jolena wrote.
"There are a lot of words in English that are spelled funny," Jolena said. "I guess writing them, saying them and using them a lot makes it easier to remember them. I thought learning these words would be difficult, but you have made it easy. Thank you for helping me!"
"It's always easier to learn something," Mariah said, "if you can figure out how to use what you are learning. That's why you wrote the sentences."
"Like the word, flour," Jolena agreed. It sounds like flower but it's spelled differently. I don't have any trouble remembering, because it's in my recipes when I bake, and sometimes when I cook other things."
Mandy looked up from her book. "Flower and flour. Those are homophones (HO-muh-fohnz)," she said. "That's what we call two words you say the same but that have different spellings and different meanings, like bough from your spelling list and bow like when you take a bow after you are done performing."
"I do this," Jolena said, "when I'm done performing a dance." She got down to the floor and bent over to show them.
"When I am done performing a triple flip, though, I do this."
Jolena said as she threw her arms in the air. "Only I'm holding my ski poles," she added.
"That isn't a bow," Mariah said. "That's saying, 'Hooray! I made it!" They all agreed.
Jolena climbed back up into the big chair. "How do you know about...homophones?" she asked Mandy.
Mandy picked up a book she had on the box she was using to sit on. "One of our readers sent me this book," she said. "It tells all about it, and it's fun to read."
"Let's read it together," Mariah suggested.
The three dolls settled on the couch to read.
"I just thought of something," Jolena said. "I thought my spelling list was tough, but at least I don't have to spell 'homophone'!"
Cast--
Mandy: Götz Happy Kidz Katie 2015
Jolena: Götz Happy Kidz Lena in Aspen
Mariah: Götz Happy Kidz Mariah, "Chosen" from My Doll Best Friend
The book How Much Can a Bare Bear Bear? by Brian P. Cleary can be found in libraries, online here, on Amazon and elsewhere. Mandy wishes to thank reader and fellow knitter Cheryl B. Waters for her generous gift of the book.
Note to children: Dolls sometimes forget to take off their shoes when they get onto a bed, couch or chair, but children play outdoors in their shoes and should always take their shoes off before putting their feet on the furniture.
"The Doll's Storybook" is not affiliated with Gotz Dolls USA Inc. or Götz Puppenmanufaktur International GmbH.
Watch for the next story each Friday afternoon at 1:00 PM Pacific Time.
Copyright © 2019, 2024 by Peggy Stuart
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