Kids Wednesday: Learning Homonyms and Homophones

I had been thinking about how to work on homonyms for awhile. My son loves joke books but doesn't always get why they are funny when they use words that are homonyms or close to homonyms.  He is very literal and I thought that he would be amused with more detail into these funny words.  I found a neat list here and thought that I would download it and work on more information around it.

I went online to find a few books that would work to help us learn more about these fun words including the following:

How Much Can a Bare Bear Bear?: What Are Homonyms and Homophones? (Words Are Categorical) 

by Brian P. Cleary

Dear Deer: A Book of Homophones 

by Gene Barretta

Aunt Ant Leaves Through the Leaves 

by Nancy Coffelt

Eight Ate: A Feast of Homonym Riddles by Marvin Terban

We read the first book at least five times the first day that we got it out of the library.  There are so many fun books out there to read that teach kids about homophones and homonyms but I really recommend the bear bear bare book if you can find it.  We had a blast learning about them and it comes up in daily conversation now!!  It is always good to add a little early on a topic that you are going to learn more about when they get older.

Since I started this project to bring it into a discussion about jokes, I pulled out a joke book that I had as an activity which uses both homophones and homonyms in the jokes.  It helps the kids practice handwriting and lets them draw a picture on the page.  I figured that I could pick out a few and we would discuss whether there were words used that had different meanings or spellings that made the joke funny. You can download your own joke book here.  She had a part two before but it is no longer available but if part one turns out to be a hit, there is also a back to school version here.  My son enjoyed the jokes and even drew a picture for this one which was super funny!  It is going to be a great memory book when he is older.

In my searching to find the book that I downloaded a long time ago, I found this one.  I quickly downloaded excited about how well it worked into the lesson plans and included lots of new jokes.

Great idea for older activities is for them to write there own book or story with the list of words.  You can make a rough draft and then write it into a book with pictures to go even farther.  I hope that you have fun with homonyms and homophones too!  There is lots of learning to be done whether child or adult with these great words!