From Kath
Last Wednesday, when the Biggies group was cycling on the slopes of Kunyani under the guidance of Georgie and Rory, I was having a delightful day back at school. For the first time in my teaching career I did what many of my colleagues do regularly – I taught in the Kinder, Prep, 1/2 and 3/4 classes across the day, sharing Orthographic inquiry with the students and teachers, diving deeply into the history of words (etymology) and the relationships between them. We worked like scientists to ask questions and make hypotheses about word meanings (morphology) while building vocabulary and spelling skills. In the session with the Kinders, we investigated the word play through a game called ‘in the family, not in the family.’ By adding smaller units of meaning (affixes) we could extend the base word to see words that belong in the same family. We used photographs of the children at play as examples of played, playing, playground, playmate, player etc.
With the Prep children we explored the notion that stories have words and every word has a story or history. The Prep’s unit of inquiry is around transportation and so we investigated the word cycle. Again we looked at a bag of words to decide whether or not they were in the same family as cycle. We discovered that the story of cycle can be traced back to ancient Greek when it was spelt ‘kyklos’ and meant a circular shape or motion or cycle of events. We discovered too that the letter ‘y ‘in a medial position in a word is a reliable sign that the word has come from Greek. What evidence is there for that?...an interesting exploration for another day! We also discovered that the word cyclamen and cyclone are in the same family as cycle! Who’d have thought?
Continuing on with my wonderfully wordy day, I wound up in the Middlies 1/2 class where they have been working on suffixes. We investigated why the suffix ‘ful’ is distinct from the word ‘full’ which has double 'l'. The children played a word exchange game to ensure that everyone understood the meaning of the words we were working with. The children created word sums, where affixes are added to base words before rewriting the whole new word. Creating word sums and announcing the letters as they are written serves to embed the understanding of an affix as a complete unit of meaning rather than individual letters. This was highlighted when we explored the idea of adding another suffix after the ‘ful’ suffix. Could we do that? Yes! When we know that the ‘ly’ suffix is a complete unit, it makes sense that hopefully has double 'l'.
Hope + ful + ly ----à hopefully.
There are four questions that begin an Orthographic inquiry: What does the word mean? How is it built? What are its relatives? How is it pronounced? On my next stop at the 3/4 class we answered all of those questions. Here, the term unit focus was around architecture and building - the perfect place to investigate the word design. What a complex word web can be made here with the addition of prefixes and suffixes! "Designer, redesigning, designate, designation", the students excitedly contributed suggestions and questions. We discovered that the word comes from the Latin word designare meaning to "mark out, point out; devise". We traced the changes in meaning over time to also encompass drawing, embroidery and scheming! We created word sums and word matrixes on the laptops to demonstrate the structure of the word. When we delved deeper to isolate the base element ‘sign’ we were struck by the size of this word family and how many new possibilities there were to explore! We realised the familial connection to the words ‘signal’ and ‘signature’ – so THAT explains how the ‘g’ got there! There is a reason for everything after all!
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