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 Etymology 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!

With an undergraduate degree in linguistics and an M.A. in education, Rebecca Loveless spent 15 years in early elementary classrooms passionately guiding young readers and writers. In 2013, after an inspiring and revelatory workshop with Dr. Pete Bowers, she left the classroom to begin a private tutoring and coaching practice solely based in Structured Word Inquiry.

Currently she is the part-time SWI Coach at The Nueva School in California. She also enjoys consulting with schools across the U.S., guiding teachers and administrators who are working to adopt SWI into their curriculum. Additionally, she offers several online classes, which have been attended by teachers, specialists, and parents from all over the world.

Along with Fiona Hamilton, Rebecca is the co-author of "The High Frequency Word Project," a teaching resource that explains the spelling of over 100 frequently used and misunderstood words. When not thinking about words, you’ll likely find her in the garden or on the hiking trails. You can read more about her work on her website at www.illuminatewords.com.