Kylie Conrad - Literacy Links Specialist Teacher

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1KHJFSEj6U/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Thanks Lyn Stone for calling out the sad situation inside most Australian teacher training courses. I’ve seen the dinosaurs first hand and they must be moved out of their influential positions immediately.

One of the things I love most about working with students to understand how words work is that, after more than thirty years of teaching, I still find myself learning something new.

There are still moments when reading, researching, or investigating a word reveals an unexpected connection, or a new understanding that makes sense of a word's spelling.

I genuinely love those moments.

The more I learn about English orthography, the less it feels like a collection of arbitrary complexities and exceptions, and the more it reveals itself as an extraordinarily elegant system of interrelationships.

Far from feeling like I've reached the end of my learning, I find that every lesson and every word adds to my understanding in the same way it does for my students. 😊

I think that's one of the reasons I remain so passionate about this work. There's always another word to investigate, another connection to uncover, another piece of the puzzle to fit into place.

I hope that ongoing word wonderment and commitment to lifelong learning help me be the teacher my students need me to be.

Has there been an idea, or even a single word, that completely changed the way you think about written language or literacy?

👖🫟🩲🫟👕🫟🧢🫟🩳🫟🧦
Oh, how I love the Oxford English Dictionary!

In its most recent update, the OED has welcomed a new word formed as a portmanteau:

floordrobe → floor + (war)drobe

And honestly, if you’re a parent of tweens, teens, or young adults living at home, you probably won’t need a definition. You may even be living with one. 😅🙄😉

A floordrobe is that familiarly frustrating “storage system” where clean clothes, worn-once clothes, clothes that don’t pass the sniff test, sports gear, and possibly one damp towel all coexist on the bedroom floor in a delicate ecosystem of their own.

Of course, the word floordrobe doesn’t quite account for the empty wrappers, water bottles, scrunched-up paper, and mysterious crumbs also sharing the habitat. Perhaps the OED is saving floorbin for a future update. 😂

You know the conversation…

Me: “Can you please pick your clothes up off the floor?”

Man-child: “Just relax, Mum. It’s my floordrobe.”

And there it is.

Not mess.
Not chaos.
Not a laundry crisis.

A word. 😂

I do love that English keeps finding ways to name the very specific realities of human life… including the domestic archaeology of my man-child’s bedroom.

And, as always, dictionaries don’t create these words. They simply record the words people are already using.

So, if your house currently contains a floordrobe, take heart.

It may be untidy.

It may even be a health hazard.

But you can ‘relax’ because it is officially, lexicographically significant. 😉

You can learn more about portmanteaus from my earlier post:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1B8hn8H28L/?mibextid=wwXIfr

And, you can read more about the OED’s latest updates here:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19J6TncqGw/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Don’t miss this beauty from my friend, Lisa, from Can Do Kids!

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FiCEqEFwd/?mibextid=wwXIfr

🌟 active 🌟 reaction 🌟 actually🌟

< act > "do, perform"

Base is one of my favourites because it perfectly illustrates a very important aspect for reading and spelling:

English orthography preserves meaning by prioritising the consistent spelling of morphemes over the consistent spelling of phonemes.

To understand words, our students need to understand how they work. Specifically, they need to know that written words are not merely a transcription from speech to print.

Speech & writing each have their own distinct 'operating system'. In the case of written language, each word is driven by an interrelationship between morphology, etymology and phonology. Words are built from morphemes, which are built from graphemes, which are built from letters. Graphemes don't always represent phonemes.

Learning about a word within the context of its morphological or base family, opens up endless opportunities for understanding not just that one word, but ALL of the words that are related to that one word AND the entire system itself. Once you have that understanding, it can be applied infinitely.

Being able to respond to students' questions or errors such as these is really important:

❓ how do we know that the suffix of 'action' is and not *?

❓ why aren't words like 'action' spelled and 'actually' spelled to match the way they sound when we say them?

❓ is the in 'act', 'action' & 'actual' pronounced differently?

❓ what is a connecting vowel letter?

❓ why is English spelling complex, & how can we ensure our students see the logic in it?

❓ is the doing in 'action'?

❓ why don't all graphemes represent phonemes?

In this one-page infographic, I've tried to represent all of the above concepts, and more!

It is available as a free PDF for a limited time via my website by entering the discount code MEANING at the checkout!
https://www.literacylinks.com.au/literacy-resources/p/act

Please get in touch if you have any questions!

Note: This resource reflects my current understanding. Learning is lifelong!

I’m often asked whether I have any availability in my student schedule, and usually, sadly, I don’t.

However, I’m about to open up a couple of new spots for families in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, with sessions held in Eatons Hill!

☀️☀️P O R T M A N T E A U S ☀️☀️

Involving students in 💫WORD PLAY💫 is a fun way to get them to love working with & understanding words!

Many of the very best classic children's authors, such as Lewis Carroll & Roald Dahl, incorporate wordplay as a literary device to make their stories and poems extra special and engaging.

A portmanteau is one such creative wordplay technique. A portmanteau is an invented or 'coined' hybrid which is formed from a blending of two or more word fragments to create a single new word. Fragments don't necessarily align with morphological boundaries, yet the creation of a portmanteau is considered a morphological process. A portmanteau incorporates the meanings of each of its original elements.

Did you know that the plural of portmanteau can be either portmanteaus or portmanteaux?

These are some common portmanteaus which most of us will be familiar with:
✂️ brunch ---> br (eakfast) + (l) unch
✂️ chortle ---> ch (uck) le + (sn) ort
✂️ velcro ---> vel (vet) + cro (chet)

Portmanteaus come up often in my lessons because we love to brainstorm for those that already exist, and we also enjoy making up our own!

This resource contains 9 full pages of information (in addition to title page & preface page), examples, prompts and questions for discussion, student activity sheets to practice what they’ve learned, all presented in an engaging and creative way to optimise student engagement!

✂️ Page 1-2: Title page, preface page with explanation & sources.

✂️ Pages 3-5: background information about the word 'portmanteau', its dual meanings, and how portmanteaus are formed, with loads of examples to illustrate the different ways they can be created.

✂️ Page 6-7: Portmanteaus as a literary device in children's literature, with an entire page spotlighting Lewis Carroll's 'Through the Looking Glass' & 'Jabberwocky', and another entire page featuring Roald Dahl's 'Fantastic Mr Fox' & 'The BFG'.

✂️ Page 8: An activity sheet that highlights how portmanteaus have been used to create the names of new breeds of dogs. 🐩🦮

✂️ Page 9-10: 'The Portmanteau Machine' - a full page with examples of portmanteaus ready for teachers and students to analyse and synthesise, followed by an activity sheet with opportunities for students to practise creating their own portmanteau words.

✂️ Page 11: Student Activity Sheet: 'Petmanteau Pocket Pet Monster’- a full page sheet where students imagine their own pocket pet monster, think of adjectives to describe it, engage in wordplay to create a ‘petmanteau’ name for it, and draw it.

For a limited time, you can download this resource as a PDF for FREE by entering the discount code CAVOODLE at the checkout via my website. Please consider giving this post a ❤ & a share!
https://www.literacylinks.com.au/literacy-resources/p/portmanteau-word-fun

💓As a lifelong learner whose understanding is always evolving, this resource reflects my current knowledge of this topic.