This self-paced asynchronous, online course is approximately 90 minutes in length. You have until June 15th to complete it.
Participants can find the recording link and handouts in the confirmation email received immediately following registration.
There’s intense debate these days about whether we should focus on solidifying grapheme-phoneme correspondences before introducing younger children to prefixes, bases and suffixes. Teaching about letter-sound links is vitally important; even 3-year-olds, however, speak using suffixes. If we start to teach our youngest children explicitly about how all written words are built with morphemes, this makes them stronger communicators and strengthens their vocabulary. Phonics and morphology have a very tight relationship - theirs is a love story of interdependence. When students over-rely on sounding out and don’t think about the morphemes in a word, they can be left with justifiable confusion about the spelling of some words. Spelling errors like iz (is), pax (packs) or jupt (jumped) can be cleared up by not only studying how to isolate the phonemes in a word and link them to graphemes by learning about the building blocks of words, as the morphology of a word influences which letters are used to spell it. Our job is to introduce young learners to our English spelling system without overloading them. We can keep it accurate and keep it simple. The two are not mutually exclusive. Pace and intensity matters - how fast we go and how deep. In this workshop we will engage with the key tools and techniques used to build phonics knowledge and morphological understanding. Along the way you’ll learn some stories about the origins of words that help explain particular spellings. There will be practice with hands-on activities you can immediately use with your students to help develop their understanding of the interrelationship between phonology (sounds in a word), morphology (the meaning-based blocks word are built with) and etymology (the history of the word).