Copyright Susan and Peter Bowers 2008
Sit back and enjoy watching as these Grade 1 students show us the basics of morphology -- and have a blast doing it!
I’m often asked how you can teach morphology with young children. When you watch this video, it is easy to see that there is no reason to think this content is beyond Grade 1 children. We teachers just have to get comfortable with it ourselves!
The integration of morphological and phonological instruction from the start
Go to this page for an explanation of why explicit morphological instruction from the start is a necessary condition of the accurate instruction of orthographic phonology (grapheme-phoneme correspondences).
I also encourage you to look at this slide show of the work these students are doing in class that addresses not only morphology, but also phonological and etymological principles.
Many thanks to Grade 1 teachers Sarah Smith and Fiona Menichelli from the International School of Beijing for sharing this excellent work from their students. I hope that seeing this kind of activity sparks teachers to think of their own kinds of spelling performances that their students can put together - and to share with us so we can share with everyone else too!
Sarah wanted to make sure to point out that they got the idea for this song from Jennifer Fixman's (of Edutunes.com). Sarah and Fiona changed the middle parts (where the kids do the word sums) and they changed the tune. You can hear Jennifer Fixman’s version here.
