I want to start by talking about the 300 High Frequency Words. I thought it was very important to mention the high-frequency words, as they are the words that our students use and need to learn how to spell the most. I think that it is vital to have students learn words they use frequenctly so that they can learn the importance of spelling. If children do not take an interest to this at an early age they will begin to think it is not important for them to learn to spell words correctly. I thought the section that talked about sight words was a good example of words that students do need to learn and I am glad they addressed the fact that they are harder for students to sound out. I believe this could make students frustrated, but it is important to explain that not all words are like this. However, the English language is a tricky one.
A second part of the text that really intrigued me was the root words section. While it is important for students to learn how to decode words, I think this is an interesting concept to bring up in a elementary classroom. At first when I read this I thought that it was a little much to try to show students the Latin or Greek concext, as well as the meaning in that language. As I thought about this topic more I realized that I had seen this in my classroom, to some extent. In my third grade classroom we had talked about the prefix "re". We talked about words that start with "re" and then went on to find a common meaning (to do again). We also discussed words that started with "re" that did not fall into this same category, words such as recognize and recorder. It made me realize that even though we did not talk about where the word can from, we did discuss meaning and words that worked with it and words that did not.
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I like how you mentioned high frequency words and specifically the 300 that were mentioned in the chapter. Not only will this help them with spelling, but it will help them immensely when it comes to sentence structure and writing. I also like how you mention that not all words are as tricky as the high frequency words when learning the English language. I agree with you that bringing up roots of words can be difficult with lower grades, but like you said it can be done without getting too in depth about the Latin and Greek origin.
ReplyDeleteSuzie, I felt exactly the same way about the root words sections and the fact that describing the actual origins of words to the students could become quite complicated. If done in a very organized and special way, I could see it being done, but I agree that the most important thing for students to gain from this is the actual meaning of root words, their prefixes, and their suffixes. If students can see that commonly the prefix re- means "to do again" because of comparing several re- words, then they are on an awesome path to understanding. And, when they can also see that not all words that begin with the letters 're' have the re- prefix, they have already learned something quite meaningful without knowing the ethnic origin of that particular prefix. History is important, but meaning is much more important.
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