Talking words with wordtorque
learn to engage students in building their understanding of how ‘words work’ at the same time you build their knowledge and skills.
This introductory workshop is an overview of English orthography along with lots of straightforward ideas about how you can study it with your students in order to build their vocabulary, spelling, decoding and critical thinking skills.
The Word Inquiry Snapshot Workshop
An Introduction to Word Inquiry
- Downloadable Note-taking Template
- Part 2 - What is orthography? (8:35)
- Part 3 - What is the primary purpose of spelling? (15:56)
- Part 4 - Why are homophones helpful? (4:59)
- Part 5 - What are word families? (5:57)
- Part 6 - Is there a process for investigating words? (11:04)
- Part 7 - How do we determine word structure? (5:01)
- Part 8 - What makes a word a word? (6:49)
- Part 9 - How do we decide if a prefix is a prefix? (6:33)
- Part 10 - Where does etymology come in (5:42)
- Part 11 - How do the 3 influences on our orthography impact word study? (4:05)
- Part 12 - Should we use a staged approach to teaching orthography? (9:11)
- Part 13 - Is there a way to avoid saying English spelling is often crazy? (11:44)
- Part 14 - Do we need to teach all possible letter-sound links at once? (3:35)
- Part 15 - How can we investigate grapheme phoneme links? (10:28)
- Part 16 - Do all letters represent phonemes? (8:41)
- Part 17 - How do we analyze the graphemes in bases? (9:32)
- Part 18 - How do you analyze the word 'washing'? (1:49)
- Part 19 - Does practice really help? (8:10)
- Part 20 - Is finding little words in a big word a helpful strategy? (5:50)
- Part 21 - What do you mean, all bases aren't words? (20:20)
- Part 22 - How do we put it all together? (18:49)
- Activities to use with students (8:27)
Once you've finished the Snapshot Workshop, you may be interested in
this targeted exploration of how Phonics and Morphology can be taught together:
Engage with key tools and techniques used to build powerful morphological and phonics knowledge
Our students must learn prefixes and suffixes as well as letter-sound correspondences.
How exactly do you fit this into the day?
Is it possible to teach both in the same lesson?
Well, phonics and morphology have a very tight relationship - theirs is a love story of interdependence. When students over-rely on sounding out and don’t think about the morphemes in a word, they can be left with justifiable confusion about the spelling of some words.
Spelling errors like iz (is), pax (packs) or akshun (action) can be cleared up by not only studying a wider range of letter-sound correspondences but also by learning about the building blocks of words, as the morphology of a word influences which letters are used to spell it.
If this is something you’ve been wanting to explore, then this workshop is a great place to start!
