I began work with *Lena, a 7-year old rising 2nd grader, this week who was recently assessed and given a diagnosis of dyslexia. She is delightful, charming, and eager. When I first met her, she ran to get an iPad, wanting to show me a story she had read a number of times from her Raz-Kids subscription. After a "warm" read of Five Brothers, we talked about how the look-alike brothers used their gifts to fool the magistrate who had imprisoned one of the brothers. Working together, they were able to overcome an apparently insurmountable task, a requirement for the brother's freedom. Sounds like there is a good life lesson in there! In weaning students from a phonics-first approach, I often start with noticing the graphemes in words to see how they are represented in text. There is certainly some phonology involved, but the phonemes (akin to "sounds" but the focus is on the shape of the mouth and the breath as opposed to what is heard with the ears) and graphemes (one to three letters that form a single phoneme or an orthographic marker) are an integral part of the morphology and etymology of the English language. My goal is for students to learn the interrelationship of morphology, etymology, and phonology to help them understand the way English writing system works. In the beginning, I often start with the 4th question in SWI: "What graphemes function coherently...?" since phonics has been the primary instructional method at this age. I quickly invert the questions to begin with meaning in subsequent lessons. In school Lena has been immersed in a phonics-based program which begins with a focus on "letter-keyword-sound" for consonants and vowels called Fundations. As a way to meet her where she is and take her to the next step, we went on a hunt for words in the text with the grapheme <s>. She discovered that the <s> can represent many different pronunciations: /s/, /z/, /ʒ/, and /∅/; notice the angle brackets for the grapheme, and the slash brackets for the phoneme. We’ll discover later that it also represents /ʃ/ as in <sugar>, and, who knows?, maybe there are other phonemes for <s>. She was fascinated with this approach. See the slideshow below. I introduced Lena to the IPA symbols to represent the pronunciations for the grapheme <s>, but I won't expect her to write them, just recognize them as a tool used to differentiate pronunciation from spelling in order to further differentiate phonology from phonics. We can also use her bilingual ability in her favor here because IPA can represent pronunciation in any language, regardless of spelling. That would have come in hand when I was traveling through Wales with my family (see Welsh road sign in slideshow)! As she found words with <s>, we grouped them according to their pronunciation. Then we looked more closely at a few words. I asked her what she thought the <s> meant at the end of <brothers> and <tears>. She was able to tell me that it meant "more than one." I asked her how the <s> in <treasure> was pronounced and she said /ʒ/; notice the <s> is followed by a <u> and came through French, originating in Greek as thēsauros. This made my day because I think of a thesaurus as a treasure trove of words! The pronunciation of <treasure> in English gives us not only a clue about its origin, but also which spelling we might use. Think about <measure> and <pleasure> for comparison. One surprise is that sometimes graphemes have no pronunciation at all within a word. In the word <island>, for instance, Etymonline tells us that the <s> was inserted in the 16th c. as a mistaken association with <isle>. Lena also noticed the word <squeeze> in the text as we were finding words with /z/ spelled <s>, so I said that we can also look at the pronunciation first and look for the graphemes that represent the spelling of the phoneme. The words <is> and <squeeze> represent two ways to spell the phoneme /z/. This lesson took all of about 30 minutes before we moved on to math for the rest of the session. Tomorrow, I'll drop a matrix and word sum into the mix and see where it takes us! *Lena is a pseudonym. Sources: Etymonline Word Works Kingston
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