Fiona Hamilton

Lots of coronavirus language has sprung up with Covid19. Find out what a knuffelcontact has to do with knights or knees and even Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems.

Learn about the structure of the terms synchronous and asynchronous, find related words, and investigate the prefix syn-.

Practice finding words in a morphological word family through an in-out sort. Show your students the video and set the challenge to create their own.

Solidify your students’ understanding of the structural elements of words, the morphemes, through practice. Show them the video and set the challenge.

In these uncertain coronavirus times lift your mood, play some music, dance and along the way do some word inquiry around the base dance.

Look closely at the morphemes and graphemes in a group of four words to find the one that doesn’t belong. Is there really only one ‘odd-one-out’?

All words have stories of their own. The etymology of words like erupt and interruption shows us how they are connected by both meaning and structure. Learning the story of a family of words helps deepen comprehension.

Reinforce a key concept of English orthography – that letters usually represent more than one phoneme. As it’s close to the end of the school year in many schools, <close> seems an appropriate word to contemplate while examining the different phonemes the letter <s> can represent.

Learn about how to get your students to show their understanding of digraphs, prefixes and suffixes through spelling-out structure.

I have started to create some songs and videos that I hope will be helpful in your journey of orthographic inquiry. In this song, morphemes, the meaning-based building blocks of words, are explained. The tune, The Wheels on the Bus, will be familiar to most younger learners.

Groups of letters that are common in multiple words often appear at first glance to carry the same sense and meaning. This is especially true of morphemes. Read about an investigation into ‘ship’ and whether it means the same thing whenever it appears in a word.

It’s interesting to look at words in the new family. Have you ever considered that the news we read or watch each day literally means new things? It’s probably generally considered to be a base on its own now rather than a plural. Such is the changing nature of language.

It’s really useful for your students to have a visual cue when you are talking about the meaning-based building blocks of words. Visuals give them an additional way of accessing and storing the information.