The aim of this workshop is to increase your understanding of the schwa. Once your have a clearer understanding of what it is and why it occurs, you are better poised to help your students recognise it with positive impact on their reading and spelling. This pesky phoneme, often described as the mid central vowel, is the most common sound in English, yet it can be hard to identify and even harder to know which vowel grapheme to use to write it. It’s all about stress and stress can be very stressful!


Multisyllabic words are full of schwas so we’ll be diving into ways to help students read and spell these longer words. But this sound doesn’t only hide in big words, you’ll encounter it even in the simplest of words - for example, a
and the - so the more you know about our orthography the easier it is for you to help your students.


Workshop participants are encouraged to create a working list of a few words they have noticed have a schwa when they pronounce them.

The Schwa

Word Inquiry Community Requested Workshop Curriculum



  Introduction
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  Stress and Vowels
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  The Active View of Reading
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  1-syllable and Multisyllabic Words
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  Digging into the Schwa
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  Morphology Helps
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Registration Pricing


Featured Workshops


The Word Inquiry Snapshot Workshop: An Introduction to Word Inquiry

Module 1 of the Word Inquiry Access Workshop

Fiona Hamilton

Fiona Hamilton

$100

Phonics and Morphology: A love story

Engage with key tools and techniques used to build powerful morphological and phonics knowledge.

Fiona Hamilton

Fiona Hamilton

$30

Targeted Morphology Workshops: Finding Families

Fiona Hamilton

Fiona Hamilton

$50

Targeted Morphology Workshops: Attesting Affixes

Fiona Hamilton

Fiona Hamilton

$50

Targeted Morphology Workshops: Collecting Compounds

Fiona Hamilton

Fiona Hamilton

$50

Targeted Morphology Workshops: Bound Bases

Fiona Hamilton

Fiona Hamilton

$50

Play Makes It Stay - a wordtorque Word Inquiry Community Requested Workshop

The aim of this workshop is to increase your confidence in using games and activities to consolidate orthographic concepts. Little and often is the key as we engage students in retrieving and reviewing material already studied. Circle games, lesson breaks, exit tickets, energizers - there are so many ways we can have fun while ‘practising to make permanent’. Getting students moving is helpful to cement learning pathways - and these ideas can all be adapted for those working with individual students, small groups or a whole class. Likewise they can be adapted for our youngest learners to teenagers. We’ll explore ways we can facilitate retrieval rather than just reviewing concepts.

Fiona Hamilton

Fiona Hamilton

$10

Bringing Word Inquiry into Shared Reading - the power of one shared text - a wordtorque Word Inquiry Community Requested Workshop

The aim of this workshop is to increase your confidence in using one text over a number of days in order to study orthographic concepts as well as author’s craft. When the text is clearly visible for the teacher and students, the work of the reader can be explicitly modelled and shared. After students are familiar with the content, they are better able to focus, in return sessions, on building knowledge and skills at the word, sentence and text levels. We will not only look at what you can teach but also text selection - how do you choose the perfect text? Ideas for mapping out 4 -5 lessons using the same text will be shared as well as a potential structure for each lesson. This workshop is being co-presented with Erika Olson. Erika works as the Literacy Coach at NIST International School in Bangkok, Thailand.

Fiona Hamilton

Fiona Hamilton

$50

Word Inquiry Assessment - How and what to assess so you will know what your students understand and can do - a wordtorque Word Inquiry Community Requested Workshop

The aim of this workshop is to increase your understanding of how to identify what your students are learning and what they are not. When we teach our students about our English orthography, we can’t teach them how to spell or read every word so we must teach them concepts as well as knowledge and skills. We want them to understand ‘how words work’ and as such we need to assess this understanding and their ability to apply it to new words. However, we also want our students to be building a solid body of knowledge and skills and we have to assess their progress as spellers and readers. We will be exploring formative and summative assessment and identifying how your analysis of what students are learning must inform your planning, in order that you adapt your teaching to the needs of your learners.

Fiona Hamilton

Fiona Hamilton

$50