February 9, 2010

We only have 3 days of school this week, so instead of doing a formal week of spelling, I decided to have a morphology awareness week. Yesterday I modeled and had the kids create Morpheme Triangles. You use an inverted triangle and break a word into its word parts. You use the inner corners to write the definitions and then create word lists on the outside of the triangle with those word parts. It was a difficult task for some groups, but they were clever and creative and used their dictionaries to help them. Some word parts were hard to define and that will be an area we will continue to work on. They really enjoyed this activity and it led to great discussion.

Today we played a game called Prefix Change. It is like playing UNO, but you match words with the same prefix. Instead of WILD cards, you use CHANGE cards. The kids loved this game. They helped each other work on pronouncing the words and were discussing what the words meant in their groups. We had enough time to rotate the groups of cards, so each group was exposed to 12 different prefixes. This game took some time for me to prep, creating the cards, finding the words and prefixes that would work, but it was so worth it!

Tomorrow we are going to play Find A Word. Students will be given a word part and they will have to find the person in the room who has the other part of their word. They will get together, figure out how to pronounce their word, figure out what it means, and use it in a sentence. They will then teach the class their word and how to use it.

Thursday is an inservice day and I am presenting literacy activities to the 3rd-6th grade teachers in my building. This is part of my responsibilities as a Literacy Facilitator in my district. I will be presenting the Morpheme Triangles and Prefix Change game along with other strategies on making inferences, summarizing, and activities to use during guided reading. I hope they will find the two morphological activities as worthwhile as I have.

As far as my reading, I am truly enjoying William Nagy's work and findings on morphology.