Learn to understand the richness and complexity of English spelling by investigating words via Structured Word Inquiry and the 'four questions.' Spelling does make sense when we study the interrelation of morphology, phonology, and etymology. Participants will learn to: * Recognize words are built with meaning-based units * Analyze words using word sums and matrices * Identify and differentiate between free bases, bound bases, and historical roots * Begin to use Etymonline.com to find etymological information * Teach the three suffixing conventions * Teach about function vs. content words, including high frequency words * Construct lessons to support content area vocabulary and writing * Lead investigations that help students make sense of English orthography

This intro level course teaches the foundations of Structured Word Inquiry theory and practice including special considerations for our youngest and more emergent learners. Topics include: Getting started with word families and morphology The role of phonology, phonemic awareness, and orthographic mapping High frequency words and first conventions Introducing word sums and matrices What reading instruction looks like with SWI What writing instruction looks like with SWI

Etymological information provides the essential key to understanding the spelling of many words and their relatives, but it can feel daunting at first to wade through word histories. In this course, I guide you through creating annotations of entries from the Online Etymonline Dictionary and offer tools to help you and your students learn to recognize the roots of words, which is a key piece of evidence needed to determine word structures and relatives. With this practice, you will gain a deeper level of confidence in creating morphological and etymological word families with word sums and matrices. Another added benefit is you will learn to recognize and tell the stories of the fascinating journeys that many words have taken through time! This course is appropriate for those who have been already been working with word sums and matrices, but find themselves getting stuck when researching etymology. It aligns with the first session of my "Beyond the Intro" course.