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Flower or flour?
Overview
Use the Wisconsin quarter to teach your students about homophones!
Activity
Show your students an image of the Wisconsin quarter. Ask them what they see and list their responses on the board. If necessary, include that an ear of corn, a wheel of cheese, and a cow are featured on the coin's reverse design.
Write the word "homophone" on the board and ask students to guess what this word might mean. Give the example "night" and "knight" as hints. After hearing a few guesses, explain to students that a homophone is two or more words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings.
Distribute one Homophone Help handout to each student. Review again the definition of a homophone, pointing out that two words do not need to be spelled the same, only pronounced the same, in order to be a homophone. Complete the first example on the handout together by reading the sentences and drawing corresponding pictures underneath each. Continue to model the activity by completing the second example as a class.
Have students select two pairs of homophones from the examples at the bottom of their handout. Students will write a sentence and draw an illustration for each word in the homophone pair. Allow students time to share their creations at the end of the activity.
Extension
For students more experienced with homophones, omit the list of examples at the bottom of the handout and have students generate their own examples for use in the activity.
Standards
The project described above reflects some of the national standards of learning as defined by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE), and the International Society for Technology in Education. These standards are listed below:
Language Arts Standards
Demonstrate competence in the general skills and strategies of the writing process. Students will demonstrate the difference in meaning in a pair of homophones through sentence writing.
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