Luke Woods: Structured word inquiry

Making sense of spelling

This has certainly been a challenging year; my first experience within the PYP and also being introduced to Structured word inquiry. The first exposure I had was with groups of adults and while I was immediately intrigued I found it hard to relate back to the students in my ELC3-Reception class. Lyn Andersen then came and demonstrated exactly how to do a lesson with my class and the hands on, kinesthetic approach she used made a lot more sense. I'm still learning definitely, so I'm not going to try to talk in too much depth about this approach but the following is what I gathered most from the workshop. It was great to learn some more tools of Structured word inquiry, Lyn did a great job of fitting it all in on one day.

The hypothesis before Structured word inquiry:

The function of English spelling is to represent pronunciation

After:

The function of English spelling is to represent meaning and structure

Free base is a base that can be a word on it's own
e.g Word sum: base - play - re + play - word - replay

Bound base is a base that needs to be in another word
e.g base - struct - struct + ure - word - structure

Orthography - study of writing system

Morphology - structure of words

Etymology - relatives/origin of a word

Grapheme - each sound in a word - angles brackets < ph >

Phoneme - single sounds within language - slashes /t/

Morpheme - prefix, base, suffix

When looking at single letters or sounds it is called 'Phonological inquiry of a letter or grapheme'

Monograph e.g f

Digraph e.g ph

Trigraph e.g ugh

Example of a Word web

Jumps Jumper

Jump

Jumping Jumped

Example of a Word matrix