Let's Read

Tomorrow (Sat. 5/30) you'll find me here from 12-2 in Sheridan, Oregon. Come check out the Homeschool Resource Fair!

"Hypocritical" was a fun word to explore! My student was familiar with the body part, "hip" (Anglo-Saxon/German origins), and "hippopotamus" meaning "horse" (Latin/Greek origins), and wondered if the "hypo" spelling was related.

Another word analysis: We were trying to figure out the literal meaning of "introduction", and what the base "duct" meant. This was a fun exploration!

How early can you start with morphology and word analysis?

Would it surprise you if I said preschool or kindergarten?!! You could start by showing a picture of a cat. As a class you could say the word cat (identifying it as one word). You could write the letters and show that it has three letters in the word. Then you could all say the sounds as the teacher marks each letter with a sound dot. (Students could pop a pop-it, slide a disc, or smoosh a playdough ball as you say each sound.)

The next step or lesson could bring in the very beginning of morphology: introducing suffix s.
Teacher: "This is a cat", as you point to a picture of one cat. "What do we have now?" as you add another cat to the picture.
You have cats. You can do a word analysis with cats, emphasizing that when we add the s or /s/ to the end, it means more than one. "We call that 'suffix s', and it means more than one."

The following day you could do the same thing with another simple noun.

For more advanced students you can do the word analysis by counting letters, words, and sounds each time.

Another word analysis we did this week was for "disinfecting". What a great word to check out! Once we peeled off the prefixes and suffix, we were left with "fect". We thought of other words with that base and tried to think of a connection. My student came up with gross and germ. Then we pulled up https://www.etymonline.com/ to check the word's origins.

Analyzing Words! I've incorporated this activity in my daily warm-ups and we're loving it! It's a great way to reinforce skills from letters and sounds to morphology deep dives. I choose the skills, and my students choose the words. Here's one we worked on this week. This student is working on saying the sounds that make up individual words. They sometimes get letters and sounds mixed up. Sometimes they get words and syllables mixed up. We count the vowel sounds to figure out how many syllables there are.

Hey, it's been a minute! My Reading Instruction Journey Part 10 is looooong overdue! Last we left off, I dove into the world of Orton-Gillingham, learning more about morphology and how to analyze psychoeducational evaluations to better meet the needs of my students.

Since then it's been a journey of exploring how to offer more effective writing instruction. I took a deep dive into ThinkSRSD and The Writing Revolution. This year I'm taking what I learned from the The Writing Revolution's approach, and starting back at the sentence level. We're moving toward well-designed paragraphs, before tackling multi-paragraph outlines and papers. It's a back-to-the-basics approach that my learners need.

I also continued to learn more about morphology, looking at the approaches from Orton-Gillingham, Jessica Toste's Word Connections, and Anita Archer's Rewards program. My students are learning how to read, spell, and understand the meaning of the most used prefixes and suffixes. We look for them in multi-syllabic words so the parts we need to decode are smaller, and more manageable.

In the past year I've also been intrigued by Structured Word Inquiry. I stayed up WAAAAY too late one night googling everything I didn't know, but thought I should know. And when you do that, you end up with more questions, never finding ALL the answers. My exploration led me to Mary Beth Steven (of Mrs. Steven's Classroom blog: https://mbsteven.edublogs.org/swi-class/). I emailed her a question, which she answered. Admittedly, I still had more! In the past month I took a two day workshop from her and learned more about morphology and SRI than I could process. Did she answer all my questions? Of course not. But that's not a knock to her AT ALL. One tid-bit of advice that she gave me was that it's OK to not know it all before you explore. During that exploration, you might find that even the English word experts don't have all the answers--AND THAT IS OK!

I tend to want to know it all before I teach it all.

Today, the highlight of my day came as I was helping a student decode "pandemic". The student knew "pan" meant all. And from there it snowballed into an exploration. As the student thought through the meaning of what "dem" could be, they listed some words that included it. I smiled (actually knowing what we'd discover) as we looked up the origins of each word. You can check out our work on the image. I hope their process of discovery makes you smile!