HeadlinesClassroom Blogs Lead the Way New Real Spellers Investigations (<auspicious> new videos & resources)New capabilities for on-line workshops with Zoom

The DetailsFor most of us the school year has just begun -- and yet there is already so much to share. Let’s get started!

Classroom Blogs Lead the WayOne of the prime sources of the extensive growth of structured word inquiry instruction over this past year can be traced to the exceptional work students and teachers have been sharing on a growing number of teacher blogs. Even students just introduced to the structure and order of English spelling are doing spectacular work. On the following pages are just a few highlights that I hope you visit to deepen your own understanding of English spelling and how it can be studied in the classroom.

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WordWorks Newsletter #71 An auspicious beginning of a new school year with WordWorks

Upcoming Workshops• Oct. 12: Full day workshop with the

Tennessee International Dyslexia Association

• Oct. 13 - 15: 3-Day workshop with the University School of Nashville

• Oct. 17 - 18: Innovative Learning Conference at The NUEVA School, San Francisco.

• Oct 21 - 25: The NUEVA School• Oct 26 - 27: 2-Day workshop open to

public hosted by The NUEVA School (Hillsborough, near San Francisco). Download flyer with details here.

• Nov. 2 - 3: (in planning stages) A co-led workshop with Pete Bowers & Gina Cooke in Illinois. Looking for a school to host. Contact Pete.

• March 8 - 9: (in planning stages) Co-led workshop with Pete Bowers & Lyn Anderson at ISKL in Kuala Lumpur (Contact Pete if your school is interested in a workshop around this date.)

• April 5-7: 3-Day Workshop with Western Ma Learning Centers for Children. Held at Longmeadow High School. Details TBA

Note: There are more workshops being planned that are not listed above. If you are interested in either on-line or on-site WordWorks workshops, please email Pete asap.

Note: In each of these blogs, some of the richest learning is to be found in the comments section. Don’t forget to follow the comments or to add to them yourself. You never know what you might learn by asking a question!

Dan Allen’s Grade 5 Class from ZurichSome may find it hard to believe that students could dive into the level of orthographic detail that Dan’s students have in only a couple of weeks. I love the student quote that provides the title of his most recent post “It makes so much sense!” Click here for his blog.

Click here for a must-see post from the beginning of the year. Make sure to follow to the end. You will get to learn along with Dan’s students as the Old Grouch uses Zoom to video conference with them. This video (screen shot above) of this class being introduced to the order of English spelling is just priceless. I can not recommend it highly enough.

Ann Whiting’s “Word Nerdery” Grade 7 Blog from Kuala LumpurSee the spectacular work Ann’s students are up to in her new blog for this year’s crew of students. So rich, so fast.

Her previous site from last year, Word Nerds, is still available. For example, I recently stumbled across this gem of a video (screen shot above, right column) of two s tudents descr ib ing the i r learn ing about the

interrelationship of orthographic morphology and etymology through their presentation of how a single root grew into ten bases! (Click here for that full post.)

This understanding of how a root can grow into multiple bases is so important. After learning from Ann’s students on this topic, I recommend you visit this link in the Real Spelling Gallery to watch the tutorial film “Understanding

the terms Base and Root”. In that film, Real Spelling shows how the Latin root ‘disc(us)’ grows into the current English bases < d i s k > , < d i s h > a n d <desk>.

Lyn Anderson’s Beyond the Word Blog from Bogor, Indonesia (Structured word inquiry with young children)

Regular readers will know I’ve been pointing to Lyn’s new blog since it came out last year. Her latest post on Using Big Books to investigate the structure of the English Language is typically excellent.

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Anyone interested in developing their understanding of this instruction in the younger years is encouraged to carefully explore all of the posts on this blog. I learn something every time I visit.

Note: These 3 blogs are accessible from Real Spellers.

Mrs. Steven’s Classroom Blog (Gr. 5 in Wisconsin)

Mary Beth Steven’s blog blasted on the scene last year after she stumbled across Dan Allen’s website. Again, explore the archives of this ex t reme ly r i ch s i t e . Although, their new school year has not yet begun, Mary Beth ran a Real Script Summer School option at her school that is described in her latest post. Highly recommended!

Skot Caldwell’s Smallhumansthinkingbig (Gr. 1 Blog in Kingston, ON)Skot is moving to upper elementary this year, so this wonderful blog will remain as an archive teachers can gain from for years to come. His final post on his “Word Wall Experiment” is well worth visiting or revisiting.

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Ms.Whiting's Prep Class Blog (in Singapore)

This brand new blog is produced by Imogen Whiting, (daughter of very proud Ann Whiting!). Her inaugural post, An Inquiry into Digraphs and Suffixes, is a brilliant example of how students can i nves t i ga te t he written word through scientific inquiry from the very beginning of formal schooling. A must for teachers of young children!

Investigations on Real SpellersReal Spellers offers our community the invaluable virtual meeting space where we can share our learning and questions. A couple of posts I want to share follow below.

Investigation of <auspicious>: Anatomy of a Structured Word InquiryWe had more participants than ever for this year’s summer courses on Wolfe Island. (At this link, see a lovely reflection from Mary Beth Steven who attended the first course.)

Susan Brady was one of the large crew in our second course at the lovely Shanti Retreat. Those of you familiar with the reading research may know about her work in phonology. Susan was a speaker at the same symposium at which I presented at the IDA last year in Baltimore. After that meeting, Susan was interested enough that she

took it upon herself to come up to Wolfe Island for this course with a couple of friends.

In an email correspondence with a small group after the course, Susan posed a question about the structure of the word <auspicious>. The investigation that followed, and the discoveries that we all made were just fascinating, and so relevant to the studies of that summer course.

As a result, I created this document (see below) in which I attempt to share the process of a structured word inquiry. It is also filled with links and resources to the underlying concepts encountered along the way. (The ‘root and base’ videos linked this update will also help with making sense of that investigation.)

I posted this document in Real Spellers with the hope that readers will continue the conversation. That conversation has begun -- and now includes a tutorial film of the Old

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Grouch’s exploratory study of the structure, history, relatives and meaning of this word. Follow the comments to the Real Spellers post “An Auspicious Investigation” to view the movie -- and to see what this word could possibly have to do with ornithology!

A Communal Investigation of <community>I am excited about my return the excellent Nueva School in San Francisco this October. The staff are keen to dive deeper into this work since last year’s visit. (I’m also keen to see the continuation of the “Homophone Project”!). This trip includes presentations at the Innovating Learning Conference and a 2-day workshop open to the public. For the 5 days in between I will be working with the staff and students of Nueva.

To make the most of that visit, I am conducting on-line sessions for teachers and in classrooms with the aid of a new video conference software called Zoom. This has proven to be a major improvement over Skype. Aside from a consistently superior video and audio quality, Zoom allows me to share my screen smoothly so that participants can follow from across the continent (or the world) as I build word sums and matrices, jump over to the Word Searcher or Etymonline to research the history of a word, etc. During the summer I led a number of investigations with students in Melbourne in this way with great success.

I conducted a three-hour Zoom session (screen shot at left) with teachers to get the orthographic engine started the week before students arrive.

One of the words that teachers asked me to investigate was the word

<community> since that is an area of inquiry for the Grade 1’s at the start of the year. I assumed it would be a straight forward investigation, but as we got into it, we found lots of interesting surprises that needed more time to investigate.

As a result I’ve posted my research on the etymology and morphology of this word and possible relatives at this link on Real Spellers. The Nueva teachers and I are hoping that students and teachers around the world will be interested in taking this investigation further and sharing their learning on Real Spellers. Clearly as this is a topic of study in schools everywhere, it would be great to build our communal knowledge of the structure, history and meaning of this word. The Old Grouch has already posted some initial cues. Hope to see your ideas there!

And with that, I look forward to another school year of structured word inquiry that has certainly taken flight with an auspicious beginning!

Pete Bowers, Sept 1, 2013

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