"Sound it out." I'm curious how often this approach actually works for English spellers. I'm thinking it's not all that often. I've read that approximately 50% of English words can be spelled by sound/symbol correspondence, but really? Does that account for phonemes (basically, the sounds...
Whoa, it's been a while since I've added to my posts here. There just isn't time to pull together a blog post with the thoughtfulness it deserves. But my work continues to amaze and excite me ...
This is something I wrote to some colleagues, that I thought might be worth sharing here ...
Sometimes a guinea pig is all you need to motivate a reluctant writer. Thanks Jumpy! ...
I was discussing a word with a student the other day and she said, "Agh! Why can't we just spell a word the way I say it?" Which, of course, launched a big discussion about how different people say the same word many different ways...
Here's a great infographic about how I approach literacy: [caption id="attachment_16080" align="alignleft" width="1006"] Graphic describing structured word inquiry[/caption] Thanks Dvora Kravitz! (http://www.dvorakravitz.com) ...
Are you ever confused about whether you add <s> or <es> when making a word plural (e.g., rose/roses, iris/irises, lilac/lilacs)? Or 3rd person singular (e.g., he dribbles the ball, he passes the ball)? Often students are asked to memorize when to use one or the other,...
Building words from a matrix offers so many learning opportunities: practicing adding prefixes and suffixes, investigating word histories, increasing vocabulary, and more. If you reached this page from our 404 page, take a look at the matrix and discover the word sum <err + or --> error>. ...
In a recent session, after having used a flowchart for suffixing patterns, we decided to create our own. There was a lot of revision as we thought of additional word sums that wouldn't be right with our current model. ...