Coaching Word Recognition
I really like the Using Words You Know lesson in Chapter 5. You start out with four words that the students are familiar with and you place them on a chart. From there, you explain that words that rhyme usually have the same spelling pattern. Each student comes up to the chart and adds a new word under a preexisting word that rhymes. After a long list of 10 or 12 words has been added under each original word, you explain to students that rhyming is a great tool to help them spell since words that rhyme are often spelled alike. This I thought, was a good activity to get all students involved and to show them that they know more words than they think, and also that those words are related in some way. This section of the chapter helped me to brush up on my rhyming skills.
| some of the best books to teach rhyming and language in a fun way |
I also liked the Nifty-Thrify-Fifty Words. The English language is "morphologically complex" meaning that for every one word you know, you can figure out how to spell, decode, or build meanings for at least six or seven more words. Words in the English language can be chunked and from those chunks, one can interpret meaning. For example, the word discover...dis usually changes the meaning of the word to the opposite, cover means to hide, so when you dis-cover, you un-hide. That makes sense right?
I thought that the Nifty-Thrifty-Fifty words list was really cool! I never thought about it until I read Chapter 5, but I "chunk" words all the time. I think that teaching students how to use what they already know to interpret new concepts is crucial to learning how to read and one of the most important lessons that they can learn.
ReplyDeleteI liked Nifty-Thrifty-Fifity-Words as well. It is funny that some of the things we teach children, are things we still use today as adults. I haven't seen a Shel Silverstein book in forever, I loved those!
ReplyDeleteAh, focusing on root words to discover meaning-such an important aspect of reading. We will discuss that more when we talk about vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteI also really loved the Using Words You Know lesson. I thought that it was really neat that you could show students how they can learn how to spell words just through one familiar word like cat and then they now know how to spell bat, hat, mat, sat, etc. Helping students to see and hear spelling patterns is really important and I think this lesson really harps on that.
ReplyDelete