Marcia Henry, past president of The International Dyslexia Association and former director of the Center for Educational Research on Dyslexia at San Jose State University comments on WordWorks:
“Pete & Sus Bowers are great ‘wordsters’ who provide teachers with an in-depth understanding of the English language. Teachers can gain so much practical knowledge from their teacher resource book, "Teaching How the Written Word Works" and their impressive and informative online WordWorks newsletter. I'd love to attend one of their workshops! Observing classrooms of teachers who have worked closely with WordWorks was a highlight of my visit to Kingston. Students were so involved and fascinated by investigating words. How fortunate they are to have wordsmiths like Sean Lonergan and Skot Caldwell as their teachers!”
Nathalie Craan is a Grade 2 teacher at the International School of Beijing and one of the participants at our 2008 3-day summer course. She recently shared work she has done with her Grade 2 students with the aid of a Smart Board. I’ve been hearing more and more about teachers excited about exploiting their growing spelling knowledge with this technology. The images here are taken directly from investigations Nathalie and her Grade 2s have been doing. Note how the investigation of the word <read> starts out as a brainstormed list, which is then manipulated into logically organized groups of words around the base. Both in that work and the <end> web you see evidence of hypotheses that were considered because of surface similarities, but then rejected because links of meaning and structure were not there. See how this group has already learned that there are three pronunciations of the <-ed> suffix, and that none of those are like what you hear at the end of a base word like <bed>! It is clear that Nathalie’s Grade 2 students are regularly engaged in creative, critical thinking which is bringing order to their understanding of how the writing system works. You will be amazed when I share the list of homophones this group discovered.
WordWorks
Spelling it like it is!
Award-Winning Research
Pete was awarded the 2006/2007 Thesis Prize in Education at Queen’s University for his Grade 4/5 intervention study. Compared to the control group, this study found gains for the experimental group in measures of reading, spelling, morphological awareness and orthographic processing. More recent analysis shows vocabulary gains. The lessons used in this intervention form the core of our book “Teaching How the Written Word Works”. His thesis and poster presented at the 2006 annual conference for the Society for the Scientific Studies in Reading can be found at this link.
Word Detectives Hall of Fame
#4) Nathalie Craan’s Grade 2 Word Detective Work on a Smart Board!
You don’t need a smart board to build “smart” word walls like these with and for your students...
Click here for previous “Hall of Famers”
While access to a Smart Board provides additional benefits to Nathalie’s teaching, it is clear that the examples here could have occurred on a traditional white board or chalk board.
I encourage teachers to start a chart like the one Nathalie’s class has that identifies words with different pronunciations of the <-ed> suffix. Perhaps your students can also look for words that end in the letters <ed> but are not suffixes. Why not write a note to Nathalie’s students through WordWorks congratulating them on their work, and showing them how it sparked further investigations by you and your class? Email us to start a spelling link that will keep on growing!
70 Word Matrices DVD from Real Spelling
The NEW
Real Spelling Tool Box is out!
Matrix for bound base <medi> for ‘between, middle’ from The Real Spelling 70 Matrices DVD.
Ilana McGrath’s Grade 4 Students extend their vocabulary by investigating their hypothesis of a connection between <medial> and <median>.
What does it mean to say that Real Spelling is not a program?
Research on WordWorks instruction:
Click here to download files presenting research on instruction based on WordWorks lessons, and research on morphological instruction in general.
Spelling Instruction and the Primary Years Programme (PYP) and
Understanding by Design (UBD)
A video lesson with a class in Beijing!
Who has worked with WordWorks?
