Thursday, September 12, 2013

Spelling Detour

You should check out Ann Whiting’s students’ techniques for talking through morphological boundaries and spelling changes in the video in this Determination post and many of her other videos and discussions at her blog from her 7th grade class last year and this year’s blog. Here’s a great lesson, “Should ‘e’ stay or should ‘e’ go”, demonstrating how the students themselves hypothesize about spelling patterns. I think I’ll be checking out her blog a lot – tons of great strategies there.

Also, Dan Allen’s blog on his fifth grade class has a nice collection of posts on spelling and language analysis.

Both Whiting and Allen reference the French-based Real Spelling and Neil Ramsden’s site, “Word Building and Spelling: Experiments in English Morphology”. It looks pretty cool, and there is a lot of information about morphological patterns and the connections to spelling. I’m not going to take the time now to delve deeper, but you might want to check out the Mini Matrix Maker. Also, the Word Searcher is a great tool for morphological analysis and spelling patterns. You can search for all the words with certain letters in that order, and then use that list to look for words that may be related to each other. If there’s interest out there from whoever is reading this, let me know and we can spend some more time with morphology and spelling. Also, Dave, Wayne, and Maya have a paper on spelling that will soon be linked here. (Right, Dave?)

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