Just this afternoon, we came across the word data (from the great card game Zigity) and my oldest (10yo) asked me, “Is that day-ta or dah-ta, because sometimes you say it one way and sometimes you say it the other?”

I replied, “It depends on whether I’m feeling American or British!”

The same kinda goes with spelling. We haven’t been doing spelling too long, because you really need to get reading down well, but we merely talk about how colour can be spelled both ways. I personally will accept both ways. I find my children tend to want to spell the British way, probably because I spell it that way, and we read a lot of older, British books, so I think it seems more familiar to them.

As far as measurements, my children sorta function poorly in both. I was thinking about having some sort of mini-measurement unit. I thought it might be kind of fun. I will probably teach them concurrently so I’ll introduce metric measurement and then line up imperial beside it. I can see a whole new set of dining room posters in my future!

That might be a great blog post if I can ever figure out the whole digital photo thing!

And thanks for stopping by. You are our very first comment ever!

My big question: what do you teach your children? Do you teach them one and then the other? Or do you teach them both at the same time? I am most interested in how to teach my children to spell. My oldest is nearly three so it’s not such an issue at present, but we’re starting to think about it. We’re seriously thinking about homeschooling so we’ll be able to control it but we don’t even know where to start. I want them to understand that although there are definite rules for spelling they differ depending on what country you’re living in.

Sorry for such a long comment, but it’s something that I’m really interested in!