Most excellent!

By the time kids hit fifth grade, they are spelling phonetically, but that doesn't equate to spelling correctly. The only strategy they know is to sound out words for spelling. But spelling is not there to represent pronunciation. It is there to represent meaning.

On Thursday I wrote the word 'collaborating" on the board and asked students to give me a hypothesis of what the word sum might be. I got a variety such as:

collab + orat + ing
collabor + ating
coll + abor + at + ing

Since two had identified <ing> as a suffix, I asked if anyone could give me a word with an <ing> suffix. They said things like jumping, walking, and talking. So we decided the <ing> was a suffix.

Next I asked how we would spell the word if we removed the <ing> suffix. Many knew it would be 'collaborate'. That was evidence enough to know that there would be an <e> in our word sum after the <at>. I confirmed that the <ate> and the <ing> were suffixes. We thought of celebrate /celebrating, educate / educating, elevate / elevating.

Next I told them that there was a prefix on this word. It is an assimilated form of the <com> prefix having a sense of "with, together". They spotted <col>. We talked about the assimilation of the <m> to an <l> in this word and how much easier the word was to pronounce this way. (We had previously talked about the <suf> in suffix being an assimilated prefix from <sub>. When you say 'subfix' five times, you automatically smooth it out and say 'suffix'. The <b> assimilates to an <f>. The same is happening with <col>.)

Then we thought of words with a <col> prefix like collect, collide, and collision. We noticed that the element following the <col> prefix began with an <l>.

Finally, looking at the word sum we know had, <col + labor + ate/ + ing>, the students recognized that the base element of this word is 'labor'. They knew that meant work. Now they knew this word meant 'working together or with someone'. We consulted an etymological dictionary to see whether we could find evidence to further analyze <labor>, but we could not. That is indeed our base element. We marked the point of stress in the word, and pronounced it.

The next day we reviewed our work.

This is how I teach students to see the structure of words and to find the meaning the spelling represents.

In the past? What do you enjoy doing the most with students? Are you familiar with the phonics rules? Would you be comfortable teaching phonics?

A friend reminded me of the best way to manage time spent training my aide.