Fiona Hamilton

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.