Homophones

[SmartPea85]

Anyone have any tips or clever ideas to help your students remember the correct spelling and meanings of typically mixed-up homophones like there/their/they're and two/too/to?

[Pink Glitter]

You can go on the internet and find pictures that illustrate the word and the spelling.Make poster or large flash cards.  People tend t o hold on to an idea if thay are able to realate back to a tangible example.

[eppie]

I agree with Pink Glitter.    Pictures will certainly help students remember the difference in the meanings/spellings of homophones.  In addition, I believe giving example sentences using each word will also help them remember the words and its correct usage.

[FunaSophia]

Write example sentences and write the different homophones in different colors.

There were girls sitting on a porch with their friends, my mother said: "I know these girls, they're really nice!"

The color mapping will help you remember the different context where each homophones is used. I hope it works for you like it worked for me. 

[martindrox]

Pictures are a great way of learning that, like the others said, that's how my students learned. but if there's a word they can't memorize it, I let them to cut the word into 3 parts and memorize it by that.

[xTinx]

Perhaps you can use the words in the same sentence to project to your pupils how they're used in various contexts. Just my two cents and you can disregard if they're not applicable. For example:

1. "Anna ate dinner when the clock struck eight."

2. "Bambi, a little deer of princely beginnings, was so dear to his mother that she risked her life to save him."

3. "I might lose this race because of my loose shirt."

4. "In order to get a raise, you must race your way to the top."

[Baburra]

I learned these when I was very young so I don't know if the teaching style would be as useful to adults, but I learned the differences mainly just by knowing the basic use of each, individually, before being compared with each other. There, for example, I learned early on, was for pointing at places, and so on.

After a while it just became second nature that I didn't even imagine that other people had trouble with it.

[Rosa]

My best advice to learn homophones would be to first write down the meanings and then practice them by using them in sentences. Also, when a person reads a lot it makes it much easier to remember when to use each word.

[czarina84]

Well, remembering that "they're" is a contraction for "they are" should help you keep from getting that one mixed-up.  As for the other two, I just learned them by seeing them over and over.  Creating sentences and reading books, I just saw them multiple times and committed them to memory.