I’m Ready for my Closeup

I’ve had the immense pleasure recently of working with two different second graders. One’s journey I’ve been documenting in a Facebook group (complete with pictures and narratives about our sessions); I call her Cupcake, because that’s the word she wanted to investigate with me first. The other, whom I call River, I just began with after working with other family members for the past couple of years.

River lives a little ways away from me, so she and I met online. Her mom prepared the physical materials for our session from files I emailed her, and I prepared the electronic version so River and I could work together.

I had met River only once in the past, and that was brief. Our first session together was yesterday, and our second, today. Yesterday, we established some basics: a base element (<heal>), its immediate family — the relatives built on <heal>, and its more distant family — the relatives that share a root but not a base.

I gave her a lot of words. I read some. She read some. If she hadn’t heard of a word, I made a decision — I either told her what it meant and used it in a sentence, or I put it aside. She identified those that had an <heal> and added them to the square that will become our matrix. Words River thought might be related went in or near the circle. Words deemed unlikely to be related went in the lower right. Over the course of our 45 minutes or so, River read several words and gave examples of those words in sentences. We discussed bases, suffixes, digraphs, pronunciation, word relatives (and people relatives).

Here’s how our screen looked at the end of our first session:

161213-brooke

 

 

 

 
Today, we picked up where we left off, and I was smart enough to record some of our time together to share with curious folks, thanks to River’s mom.

We’ll continue with this study next week, and I’ll update this post then.

[wpvideo 3EHqX0Dy]

15 Comments

  1. Kristin says:

    Nice! Have you done this with English Language Learners?

  2. Edith Patricia Ellis says:

    Thank you for sharing your session work. What a fine way to help, once again.

  3. Alison Colbs says:

    Gina, This is so helpful seeing SWI in action. Thank you for all the time you have been taking to post. Yesterday I did a matrix and word sum lesson with ‘joy.’ One word that came up was Christmas 🙂 We put it outside the circle. I can obviously see her connecting joy with Christmas, but we talked about it not having the same base or direct meaning. Is that how you would deal with that word?

    Alison (Sent from my iPhone)

    >

  4. Holly Hart says:

    Videos like this are so informative and INSPIRING. Thanks, you. And more, please.

  5. I found it interesting how, even though this part of the session started out with words in which the digraph was pronounced /i/ and your student moved on easily to words in which it was pronounced /ɛ/, she seemed to no longer recognize its ability to represent /i/ when new words were subsequently presented. An interesting conundrum.

    • Actually, that’s not at all what happened. We started with health, which has an [ɛ]. Then we did heals, healed, healing, healthy, unhealthy, and then healer. Of those, she only erred on healer. In the previous lesson, we’d talked about healer, and she couldn’t think of an example of a healer (even though Mom is a nurse). I think that word is simply one she’s not terribly familiar with. I don’t think this was a honological miscue; she wasn’t trying to sound it out. Rather, this was her reaching for a word she knows (healthier) rather than a word she doesn’t (healer). Not about pronunciation — about meaning.

  6. I don’t know why my name shows up as realspellingblog but it’s Brett.

  7. Joyce Glynn says:

    Gina–What a lovely gift! The time you took to record this and post it. It is so wondrously helpful.

  8. Laure says:

    Thanks for sharing this. What software are you working in with the student?

  9. Marsha Geller says:

    Gina, Thanks so much! You make it look so easy, yet I know there was a great deal of thought that went into these lessons! It’s wonderful to see a beginning lesson. Thanks, too, for your explanation of the pronunciation difficulty River had with ‘healer.’ I was wondering if you had dealt with that explicitly in the first lesson.

  10. Pete says:

    Hey Gina! I just came to your website looking for details on Etymology V and saw that you had this video up! What a delightful and helpful way to see your work with leaners (students and parents) in action. Wonderful.

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