Last week I had the chance to do something I had never done before, and given the opportunity, I would do it again!  I worked with fourth and fifth grade teachers and we spent a whole day training on the Month by Month Vocabulary and Phonics books.  The staff I was working with had several new teachers at those grade levels and some of the teachers had never had formal training on the activities or the reasons behind the book.

By working for a whole day, we talked about the importance of the work with morphemes, but we also physically did every activity and I was able to model three different in- classroom lessons for them to watch.  A full day is a long time to spend on one block, but the day was so productive and beneficial.  Teachers were able to mark things in their books that will help them when they are looking back to plan lessons.  They were able to talk and ask questions at a depth that never happens in the typical hour to hour and a half we spend on that block.

Word work deserves our attention in the upper grades.  Those students are constantly seeing words with prefixes and suffixes and need strategies to use when decoding and figuring out meanings.  Michael Graves talks about the four musts of vocabulary instruction and one of those musts is “word consciousness.”  The level of conversation about words should be one of the biggest changes in classrooms that are doing the many activities that focus on morphemes.  As the teacher sees opportunities to connect to words that occur in content area work, he or she models the noticing that we want students to do.  Talking about words, making connections, thinking out loud about the work we do and how it can help you figure out related words is the reason we invest the time in the first place.

Until next time....

Amanda
Amanda Arens
Literacy Consultant