Isn’t their work amazing? Check out the tools they use to deepen their understanding of the writing system, identify and correct errors in their current thinking, and create explanatory knowledge for reading and spelling.

Tim Shanahan warns of this very real potential to harm, noting that he has been hearing from many teachers whose schools have severely cut back on critical aspects of reading instruction to facilitate phonics coverage. shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/…

Children can use word sums and matrices to study English words in the permanent context of their morphological families. xitter.cf/GinaCookeLEX/status/13…

"The idea that students experiencing poverty require a watered-down, low-level curriculum is pernicious; so is conflating explicit instruction in foundational reading skills with 'drill and kill.'” - @MicheleCaracapp michelecaracappa.substack.co…

Yes! We can use word sums and matrices to help us think about the structure of written words, hypothesizing about their base elements, affixes, suffixing conventions, and relatives: fine/ + al → final fine/ + ite → finite de + fine/ + ite → definite mbsteven.edublogs.org/2017/1…

In this video, Pete Bowers demonstrates how we can introduce young children to the “What’s in the Family?” game. “It turns out that words come in families just like people come in families.” youtu.be/EhNv7AGtkAM?t=752

I think it's a good idea to help beginners see the sense in English spelling. Young children like to collect things; we can invite them to collect words that share a structure and meaning, words that share a "base element" and thus belong in the same (morphological) family.

For example, young children can understand that words are like people in that they have relatives, that words that share the spelling and meaning/sense of the base are in the same morphological family: play, plays, player, playing, playmate, playful, playfully, played. p.l.ay

Learners also typically build up grapheme-phoneme correspondence charts as they study them. wordworkskingston.com/WordWo…

@JasmineFS208 @JoAnneGross1

Based on Venezky's grapheme work? No. It's the fruit of her own independent study in orthographic linguistics. But as fellow linguists, she and Venezky do agree the present orthography is not driven by phonology. cpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.…

If we are teaching kids to spell as well as read, it may be more elegant and effective to teach them that the <t> grapheme can be pronounced four different ways. The students in @MaryBethSteve18's classroom create grapheme charts to illustrate this idea. mbsteven.edublogs.org/2019/0…

Cute dog! My dogs, Wayne and Garth, say hi back. I just checked out Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds from my library. Gonna read the first few chapters and see what I think of it. Are you reading anything fun or interesting?

It just makes learning to spell and read much more challenging for them, especially if they are stuck with a synthetic phonics teacher who doesn't understand the differences between AAE and MAE. For example:

Even better, my 12yo grandson is now fascinated by the writing system as well. Last week he asked me to investigate the word “memorial” with him (for Memorial Day), so we used the 4 questions and linguistic tools to see what we could learn. Here is what he has so far.