Teaching parts of words can be very hard and tricky. The first thing we think about are word families. Yes these little families serve a purpose. They help students to rhyme. They allow students to start to see patterns. This leads them to being able to read words that are alike. Students can also start to write word families by just changing a part (the beginning part mostly) in a word.
Thanks word families!
However parts of words are not always in a word family. That's why I like to think just about parts of words. Not saying "vowel consonant e" or "two vowels go walking" or "word families". I use parts or chunks. Just like two letters make one sound, this is for a part of a word.
Let's use 'new' today. How many parts are in new? There are two parts: /n/-/ew/. Here is a great example of how two letters one sound. But more importantly there is a part /ew/. If our students can learn new- this is a high frequency word that is used in very low level books, it's only known by practice and seeing it.
I have developed a package -FREE- on Teachers Pay Teachers. Just go to Phoundational Phonics! This package include two scripts.
1- The first script is for teaching a new high frequency word or exemplar word. It also suggests you use my FREE high frequency word trackers to monitor these words!
2- The second script is for using the high frequency word or exemplar word to build new words in writing from reading so students can build their own self-correcting processing systems.
Sometimes less is more. I know that teaching only a few words (exemplar words) can really make a greater impact students being able to decode, understand, and explain their thinking, way more than memorizing word families and rules.
So.... go on over to my page and try it out! Comment and let me know what I can do to make it better!
Happy Teaching.
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