This series is designed as a very practical course that leads participants through lessons and resources that teachers can use in a wide variety of contexts.
Session 1 models introducing the first lessons of the teacher resource book “Teaching How the Written Word Works”. These lessons are based on the intervention study with Grade 4/5 students (Bowers & Kirby, 2010) that showed generative vocabulary learning for the experimental group.
This session takes teachers through the key SWI tools of the matrix and the word sum to help us understand the spelling-meaning connections between words and how that makes sense of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences in words like “sign”. We also see how we can go through a scientific process of inquiry to develop and test hypothesis for when suffixes replace “single, silent ” (AKA final, non-syllabic ).
Session 2 builds on the first session and introduces word webs and how to go from them to word sums and matrices, and then working with suffixing flow charts to practice those conventions.
Session 3 helps teachers understand how to construct their own matrices after using the free Etymonline website to find words that share a historical root, and then using word sums to find words that share a base from which we build the matrix. This session is key for understanding the relationship between morphology and etymology and how to read and use a reference like Etymonline.
Novices can take this course to see how these tools make sense of English spelling and how we can teach it. Experts in SWI will find the details of how we can use these tools to deepen their understanding and add precision to their instructional practice. It was while tutoring students and working with constructing flow charts that Peter realized how valuable some of these practices are inspired him to add a course targeting working with these tools.
Please be advised that this series will be recorded and only registered participants will have access to the recording after each session. The recordings will be available for a period of 30days after which it will be permanently deleted from Zoom Cloud