Word Cline Vocabulary Routine

[Rosalee Ocegueda]

Anygroup of words which might be placed in order are spaced along the gradient. For example, in English we use a range of words to describe temperature, eg. tepid, hot, boiling, cool, cold, warm, chilling, and freezing. After modelling the task, these words can be given to groups of students to place on the cline from the highest to the lowest temperature.

This lesson plan is for a 7th grade English class and has the following objectives: for students to arrange words in a cline based on category or degree, use appropriate words in sentences by making clines, and actively participate in activities. The lesson will use a picture and website as materials and take 1 hour. It will include daily routines, motivating students by having them observe and describe pictures, analyzing similarities and differences and the concept of word clines through questions and a story, having students arrange words in clines based on intensity, and completing sentences using appropriate words from given clines.Read less

If we just stop there, we know something. We can connect that understanding to what we read in the news. But what if we looked more closely at this word? What if we fully investigated this word using Structured Word Inquiry? What more could we gain?

For about two months in late fall, I worked with a group of 12 students for 20 minutes a day, four times a week. These were students I also saw for 90 minutes every day when they came in as part of their homeroom. This small group opportunity is part of what our school calls WIN time (WIN stands for What I Need). As a grade level team, we talk about the needs we see and how to group the students so we can address those needs. I asked for this particular group of 12 based on spelling errors I saw in their writing samples at the beginning of the year. What an opportunity to reinforce some reliable concepts in our language!

When someone asked about , I wrote it out as a word sum. When a word ends in a single final non-syllabic , it is not as obvious to the students that the suffix being added is an . When we compare the spelling prior to adding the suffix to the spelling of the word after the suffix has been added, it would appear that only an was added. But that is not the case.

I left our notes on the board and explained the work my WIN group had done to my regularly scheduled classes. The 12 were scattered among three classes and were eager to explain things for the rest of their class when the opportunity came up.

The next day I wanted to continue looking at words that take an suffix. I wanted to focus on the ending grapheme/phoneme correspondences when the word was in its singular form. I listed the headings and together we noticed which graphemes could represent those phonemes. In the first column, I started by underlining the final trigraph and/or the digraph. then we moved to the middle two columns that ended up including four different graphemes that could represent a final /s/! As you can see, I wrote out word sums so they could see over and over that with these word final phonemes, we would need to use an suffix. I also underlined the final graphemes in each word. As we went along, the students tried adding an pronounced as /s/ and then quickly knew they needed to add an pronounced as /ɪz/. With words in the last column, we talked about the single, final non-syllabic that was following the . The students wondered aloud if it was like the that follows a ! So then we could compare the grapheme (when followed by an ) to the trigraph .

The last thing I did was to point out the vowel in front of the trigraphs and . I asked if the students recognized whether they were considered short vowels or long vowels. We said them together and they identified them as short. I underlined them in red.

Today we went back to explore the words with either a final trigraph or a digraph. The students brainstormed a bunch of example words of each. Then we made observations about what was immediately in front of each. We began to notice some consistencies. In front of a word final digraph there was either a consonant or a vowel digraph. In front of a digraph there was a single short vowel. We wondered if this could explain why a is used in and not a . It was time to get the students working on their own. I split them into groups of two. This is my favorite group size for word investigation. Here are the specific topics of inquiry for each group:

I circulate, guiding the students in now grouping the words they found. If they found a vowel digraph in front of the digraph for instance, how many words did they find with that same vowel digraph? How many different vowel digraphs did they find? Each group had some organizing to do before they could make observations.

As the groups finished, I asked them to write scripts. What would they say as they presented their findings? I told them that when they had a script written, I would revise it, edit it, and then I would record their presentation with my camera. They liked that idea! I liked the idea that they now had to think through their observations as they were writing them down. This took several days, and the video recording took several more for each group. When one group was completely done, I gave them another investigation that could easily be finished with our regular classroom work (back with their homeroom groups).

Once the last group was finished with video recording, the WIN groups were reshuffled so that other needs in other areas could be addressed. I have a new group now. We are not working on word investigations. This time we are reading Peter Pan and stopping to talk about the colorful and often times unfamiliar vocabulary used. We also pause to look at the specific writing techniques of James M. Barrie.

Last week my students wrote poems. As I was editing them, one of the errors I saw over and over was the use of when was needed. With a recently viewed meme in mind, I wrote the following on the board:

Such an important reminder! I can never forget that even when I am confident that my students understand something, I must give them lots of opportunities to express that understanding either orally or in writing. Expressing oneself with clarity comes with practice!

I stated that we had just come up with a lot of evidence to show that is a prefix in a lot of words, so it is quite plausible to think it might be a prefix in as well. Next it was time to think about the next element in the hypothesis, . I asked if anyone could think of a word with in it.

So in the end, it was decided that our word sum hypothesis could make sense based on the fact that we recognized both as a prefix and as a base. We had already talked about the word , so we knew that was a suffix in this word. Now on to the really interesting question for the day!

When we began the conversation about these four possibilities, we noticed that three of them had an suffix. We brainstormed a few words with a clear suffix and decided that an suffix was plausible. then we looked at the other identified elements. Looking at the first hypothesis, I asked if anyone knew the word . They did not. I explained that a din is an ongoing noise. I could say that there was quite a din coming from the indoor recess area. So then I wondered aloud if at dinner the participants were creating a din. Hmmm. The students thought that perhaps sometimes that is the case, but not always. We thought that if the base was , then we could imagine the doubling when the suffix was added.

When we got to the fourth hypothesis (), I modeled giving it every consideration even though in my own head I had doubts. The students did not recognize as a prefix, nor as a base. So offhand, we could not think of much evidence to support this one.

We see some of the same information here that we saw at Etymonline in the entry for . The smaller print says that disner contains the same elements ultimately as French djeuner, Old French desjuner and owes its greater phonetic reduction to its belonging to an earlier period. So the spelling reflects a phonetic reduction from one of the French spellings or perhaps from one of the late Latin reconstructed spellings. My uncertainty about the direct path the spelling took is what I have based my decision on when I leave as a free base. Perhaps someone reading this will be able to direct me to another resource or have a deeper understanding of what I can learn from the OED entry. Until then, I will only go as far in my analysis as I have evidence for.

Now I completely understand the idea of making learning fun and memorable. That is something I reflect on often in my own teaching. But I have learned to draw the line when what becomes memorable is a false premise for future learning. I understand that her goal for the school year is to have her students read and write. What she is doing will probably help her succeed in that. The method she is using is called Evidence Based Literacy Instruction (EBLI). I have no doubt that students being taught by this method leave kindergarten being able to do some reading and writing.

Fully believing in this principle has happened slowly for me because, well, old beliefs are sometimes embedded deeper than we think. Over and over I saw the proof, but still looked askance at this principle. How could it be true? Because I was wrangling with this principle, it was always on my mind. Without intentionally doing so, I began to collect my own bank of evidence.

In the past few weeks, students have been working on several orthography projects. Prior to that, they had been working in groups to create podcasts. As each group finished their podcast (based on a word investigation), they needed something new to investigate while the rest of the groups were still working. Instead of assigning the same activity to all who were ready for something, I mixed things up. In that way, when the students are ready to present, we will have a variety of orthographic concepts to be talking about. Here are the projects I assigned:

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