My plan today was to review the toggling y/i suffixing convention. The student's plan was to create a matrix with <oxy>. This primary student's class was studying <oxygen> as it relates to the human body. While I initially thought it was more important today to focus on the suffixing conventions, he was eager. So we did. Who knew that a pretty non-productive base (in my humble opinion) would yield such an interesting discussion? We started with the 4 questions of SWI: 1.) What does <oxygen> mean? "It's air that you breathe." Okay, that's a good start. So then we looked it up on Etymonline to see if we could figure out when the word was coined, or when it came into our language. It turns out to have been coined in 1777 by a French chemist with a connotation of "something that produces acid." We talked about oxidization as when rust forms on metal ("like the tow truck in the movie Cars?") in the air. Copper turns green, and blood turns red when it is exposed to the oxygen in the air. 2.) How is it built? It appears to be built on two bound base elements: oxy + gen(e) --> oxygen, a compound word. Now, this is interesting because many people think of compound words as two free base elements (two words that can each stand alone): <note + book--> notebook>, but in fact, two bound bases, or one bound and one free base element can also create a compound word. 3.) What are its relatives? We used Neil Ramsden's Word Searcher to find words with the letter sequence <oxy>. The search engine includes many words with the letters <oxy>, including <boxy> and <proxy>, which do not pass the meaning test, so they are not relatives. Surprisingly, <oxymoron> and <epoxy> are relatives! The word <oxyacetylene> was fascinating, too. By mixing the two gases, a super hot flame is created to weld metals together. The student knew that oxygen was highly flammable. We used word sums and a dictionary to confirm their place in a word matrix. He did not want to include <oxymoron> because it had a bad word in it. And that's okay because you don't have to include every possible word in your matrix. Finally: 4.) What phoneme-graphemes function coherently in this word? Through repeated verbalization in spelling out o.x.y. in the word sums, the spelling of the phonemes wasn't interesting or necessary to this student. He has less to unlearn as an early learner, so he wasn't thrown by the "odd" spelling of the base. While we didn't discuss the phoneme-grapheme question deeply this week, we could have noticed a number of interesting things here.
This boy I worked with is a natural at shifting stresses in the word family. A few weeks ago, we were studying the base <fer>, with the word <conifer>, and he said, "Like a coniferous forest?" I pointed out to him that when the stress shifted in the second word, the <o> changed pronunciation from /ɑ/ to /ə/ (short a to schwa). /ˈkɑnəfər/ to /kəˈnɪf(ə)rəs/. We have and will continue to explore question 4 more deeply in subsequent lessons, just not today. If I had insisted that we focus on suffixing conventions today (when this student wanted to explore a word that had meaning for him), he wouldn't have been nearly as engaged. We looked at our veins with delicate blue lines that showed that the blood was depleted of oxygen and talked about why it looks red when you get a cut. Ah! Oxygen is in the air, so it turns red. We looked at the circulatory system, and he remembered the <circ> base that we had discovered a few weeks ago. This session reinforced the concept of blood <circulating> throughout the body and brought the lesson full <circle>. This first grader demonstrated dexterity with replacing the non-syllabic final <e> when analyzing the word sums. And we didn't question why the final non-syllabic <e> isn't in the word <oxygen>. Huh, a question for another day perhaps. And about the <y/i> toggling? He remembered from last week the three reasons not to toggle! So, no need for a review just yet. Happy student, happy tutor!
2 Comments
5/8/2019 01:59:51 pm
Great stuff Susie!
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5/8/2019 03:43:37 pm
What a great post! I specifically love student led inquiry because there is always a greater chance that I will learn something too!
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