Strand 2/Morphology Syllabus

I think that focusing on lexical categories (parts of speech) for this morphology/vocabulary strand is a good way to organize it. So we can begin with nouns, move on to verbs, and then clauses, with the other pieces coming along (or not) along the way, but the thread connecting the lessons will be vocabulary development and word analysis rather than applications to writing.

We’ll be exploring words and their pieces, and how breaking down words into their meaningful parts can help with all sorts of things – reading, comprehension, vocabulary development, critical thinking.

Deidre and I talked the other day about how so many of the word roots and pieces that one might choose to investigate (say lists of Latin and Greek roots) come up in context and you can then explore them on the spot (or decide you’d like to; no one is supposed to know the meanings of all of these pieces just off the top of your head). And that such a spontaneous approach is much preferred to, say, having a list of words and roots to cover every week. However, we also think it might be useful to have some master list that you (and your students?) can check off as you do encounter them. So I’ll think about that.

I think the so-called syllabus for the morphology strand will be much more loosey-goosey than the grammar strand. And I’ll be responding to what’s happening in the classrooms of Deidre, Dave, and anyone else out there who ends up following along. But the following few Strand 2 Morphology posts have some ideas to get us started.