Shannon and Mary host a returning guest to the Reading Teachers Lounge @MindfulTeacherRachel, who you heard in Season 5 on the Schwa episode. In this episode, Shannon, Mary, and Rachel talk about English word histories and how they may inform how a word is spelled. Check out this discussion to get ideas for how to share word origin stories with your reading students and help students see how important morphology is in addition to sound symbol connections.
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Shannon and Mary host a returning guest to the Reading Teachers Lounge @MindfulTeacherRachel, who you heard in Season 5 on the Schwa episode. In this episode, Shannon, Mary, and Rachel talk about English word histories and how they may inform how a word is spelled. Check out this discussion to get ideas for how to share word origin stories with your reading students and help students see how important morphology is in addition to sound symbol connections.
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Mary Saghafi: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome back to the Reading Teacher's Lounge. We have a return guest today that we're so excited to share another amazing topic with. We have mindful teacher Rachel. Rachel is joining us again, and today we're going to be talking about etymology and orthographic study.
Shannon Betts: So, great topic. Welcome, Rachel.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah, Rachel you were on last season for the schwa episode, but if people have not heard that episode, can you tell us, reintroduce yourself and also tell us what you've been up to in the last year since we've spoken with you?
MindfulTeacherRachel: Of course. So my name is mindful teacher, Rachel. I talked last season about one of my passions in teaching, which is the schwa sound.
And I am a first grade teacher, so it's really critical that first graders [00:01:00] have an understanding of what schwa is as they start to decode multisyllabic words. And so that's kind of what I talked about last season, and it coincided well with, I released a children's book about the as a way to introduce the topic to students and help them start recognizing that sound as they pronounced words.
And I wrote it just kind of with my class in mind. And then I was like, well, I could, I could share this with other people. So I really enjoyed doing that. Since last season, I've actually released two other children's books kind of in the same. Series that explores trickier phonics patterns one is called, and sometimes Y, and it's about when Y spells a vowel, the vowel sounds that Y can spell and why we say that phrase, and sometimes Y[00:02:00] when we're talking about vowels, which it actually should be, and most of the time Y, because Y mostly spells vowel sounds.
And then I just released, about a month ago, a book called Short Vowel Protectors, which is about those 1 1 1 endings that go on, on words with short vowels, so like c k, d g e, t c h, those kinds of things. Because that was really important last year as I started talking about morphology with my students and understanding why, why do you need to see K here if you're going to add an ing.
Oh, that changes the word to backing instead of baking that's really important. And so that book is styled kind of like a superhero comic book style because they're short vowel protector heroes. So I'm really excited about that and I'm working on another one coming up too. So I've kind of discovered this really [00:03:00] fun passion of...
What's a tricky phonics rule that my students in first grade need access to and how can we kind of personify it in a really accessible but also storytelling format as opposed to just being like, here's the phonics rule. Remember it making it really accessible for early elementary students, which has been super fun.
Mary Saghafi: I love it. I was able to share the schwa book with a number of people, including my students, but also my children's teachers and. They have been really excited about it as well. So I highly recommend the Chouelle book and I am definitely reaching out to get some more. My Amazon basket's going to be full.
So we'll all, of course, link to those those other books. And I love the short vowel protectors. I always try to like group those phonics skills together because they do, but I've never thought of like the short vowel protectors.
Shannon Betts: And I think that's a video does that with the TCH. He's [00:04:00] got this little shield and he's like coming in.
It's so cute, but I love that you found more protectors than just the TCH. And so you're expanding that pattern. And also your mission of just making it through storytelling just makes so much sense. It makes sense to us as teachers too, because we remember the stories just like students do because humans are wired for story.
And so it just makes, It just, it makes it stick and it gives it meaning. And I love that. So keep writing those books, please.
MindfulTeacherRachel: Thank you. I'm excited to keep doing that. It's been kind of a dream to be able to do
Mary Saghafi: so great.
Shannon Betts: So let's talk about, turn to the subject of today and it might be related. You mentioned morphology a little while ago, but it might be related to it, but We want to talk about etymology because this is a subject that Mary and I both don't know a lot about and have some misconceptions around.
And so I've done some reading to research and get ready for this episode. And so I feel like I know a little more than I did, you know, a [00:05:00] few weeks ago, but can you just give us first off an overview of what is etymology and then we'll sort of talk about how it relates to teaching reading.
MindfulTeacherRachel: So etymology in a nutshell is word origin.
If you've ever heard like a spelling bee and someone asks, hey, what's the origin of that word before they spell it, they're asking about the etymology and knowing etymology of words. gives you really important information, not only about morphology, so meaning portions of that word because there are morphemes from different languages of origin, but it also gives you an idea of what the spelling is going to be, because there are different spellings of sounds that are common, say, in words that are derived from Greek, or words that are derived from Latin, and so knowing, hey, the word of or the language of origin is Latin, that tells me something about how that word is going to be spelled.
And so I always wondered growing up, like, [00:06:00] why would you ask that in a spelling bee? Like, what, what does that matter? But it's actually really helpful because then you understand that, like, for example, if you hear the sh sound, I'm going to spell that as S H. But if I learn that, the etymology of the word that I'm trying to spell with the sh sound is French.
I'm going to spell that C H, like champagne. Because I know that in French that sound is spelled with a C H. So it gives you a really good idea of why some words that we consider tricky are spelled the way they are. And where they come from, which is just fascinating.
Mary Saghafi: I love that you gave a description of the spelling because I often think of that too.
And I think that so my training is Orton Gillingham and I completed teacher training, which is a 70 hour intensive program. And I've [00:07:00] completed that with a fellow from the Orton Gillingham Institute. And so if you choose to Further your training and get certified as an associate level working Gillingham teacher.
There's a lot more etymology that you dive deep into that the board would ask you about when you are getting your final certification. And so I have definitely delved into this. I do not, I chose not to get certified. I chose actually to take a different route and do the dyslexia advocacy. And so I haven't had the opportunity in my career yet to do that.
I think that eventually I will. But one of the things that really sticks with me with my OG training is that when the fellows or when associates or anyone who has this certification level gets together, it's really common to talk about word origins and to talk about typical spellings. And if somebody is making an assumption that there's an [00:08:00] irregular word, a lot of times, The goal is to demystify why it's an irregular.
So what is the origin of that word? How can we unlock that? And there's a lot of back and forth high level discussion about this. And I think that part of our goal for this episode is to normalize this conversation type. In classrooms and in schools, because it is really important that we understand know and hone our craft as reading teachers.
And this is part of it. So while it may not have been a big piece of your teacher training, or it may not be a big piece of professional development Many educators right now are really trying to strive above and beyond to learn their craft a little bit more, and I think that this is a really good angle to take, because probably a lot of teachers in your school are also confused about a topic like this, but if you could get a small group together Start your own reading teacher's lounge, have some discussions about this.
I think that Rachel's episode here and the information that she [00:09:00] can share is a really great jumping off point. So I wanted to preface with that because I think it is really important. So I may ask you some questions too, as I'm kind of going on this journey with you as well. I really
appreciate it.
Shannon Betts: I've done research for this episode. Rachel Nudd. have read, I think some of the same books, but a great one is called Beneath the Surface of Words by Sue Hegland. And then also one that's more child friendly is Once Upon a Word, a word origin dictionary for kids. And in reading both of those books, what it did is it reframed my thinking.
And I used to, when I would talk about irregular words with students, I would sometimes and so I'm going to ask them why is it pronounced this way and if you were the boss of English, would you spell it differently? And I don't think I'm going to use that language with students anymore. Instead, I want to ask them, why is it spelled this way?
Because what I came away understanding from learning about etymology is that spelling is extremely consistent in English, even though pronunciation [00:10:00] isn't. And so, there are reasons why. Words are spelled certain ways, and it's to give a lot of information, not just graphophonic information, which we normally just think as early childhood educators that it's just a sound symbol relationship, but it's actually to give a lot more meaning based information, and that there might even be historical reasons for a letter still remaining in a word, for example in the Beneath the Surface of Words book she gives the history of yolk, like in an egg yolk, and you know, it makes sense, like the yolk that's in a wheel, like Y O K E, that, that spelling is very, you know, it follows the final E rule, it makes a lot of sense, but why would the egg yolk be spelled differently, and she says in the history from Etymology Online that it comes from Yelk, And that yolk ties to the word yellow.
So the yolk is the yellow part of an egg. And so that makes so much sense. Like the second I got [00:11:00] that I'm like, okay, the L is in there for yellow, you know, and that sometimes there's letters that are in there for etymological markers. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, etymological marker but just like a silent E might be in a word for a certain reason.
It might be to make the vowel long. It might be to change the CG to a soft sound. It might be just to hold a place marker so that we know that it is a you know, a content word versus a function word or something. But another reason why a letter might be in there that's not pronounced is to just give us some clues about its history and to sort of honor the history of that word.
And it's not there just to be a confusing spelling by Mr. Webster.
MindfulTeacherRachel: Yes, exactly. And, you know, one thing that I shared a really long time ago and I'm sure it again over the years is you know, when people say, Oh, well, English is so complicated. It's so [00:12:00] irregular talking, breaking down the numbers of that, you know, about 50 percent of words are.
completely regularly spelled based on their sounds. And then another 30 have maybe one irregular sound in there. And then 10 percent can be explained, like 10 percent of a regular We spelled words that we think are irregular can be explained by etymology. So looking through the word origin and thinking, Oh, you know, that's why there's an L in yoke.
That's why in the word school, there's a C H, even though we don't say sexual, you know, why is. It's it like that and I feel like I really hype up social studies in my class like history was my favorite thing in high school, and I had taught at schools before that didn't have any sort of social studies programming [00:13:00] so I really hype that up for my students.
And when you link etymology in and start these conversations with kids even six and seven year olds, they really start to see the overlap between language and literacy. And history and social studies, which is super cool interdisciplinary bridge that they're all of a sudden, many experts in and able to talk about and reason with and ask really good questions about and notice aspects of words.
Hey, I saw this word in the newspaper that my dad was reading this morning. Is this for? From Greek, I noticed there's a ph in it, that kind of thing. So, you know, it's something that I think we're all continually learning about. I'm not a professional linguist, like I didn't go to school to be a linguist.
It's very fascinating to me. And so I look it up a lot. But this understanding that, like you said, [00:14:00] Shannon, you know, the spelling carries this historical meaning in so many words. not only of where the word is from, but it also might have, you know, morphological implications. Understanding that and conveying that to kids helps kind of demystify English, and it helps give them access to a much broader vocabulary of words to read and spell and talk about, as well as, you know, Kind of explore in terms of, oh, wait, I'm not necessarily using my sound spelling here, because even though I know that it sounds like, you know, Rachel told me this word.
It's from Greece or it's an ancient Greek word. So I'm going to use pH. So that kind of thing. It's, it's really interesting to kind of invite kids into that exploratory conversation and say, you know, I'm not the expert in this. Let's look this [00:15:00] up. Here are some resources to look it up. Shannon mentioned the once upon a word dictionary for kids, which is awesome.
My kids It's.
I think that's hilarious and I'm like, yes, you read the dictionary. But. It's, it's really, really actually quite accessible to kids. And it's okay to not know all of etymology ever. Like I, I don't think that's necessarily possible. But having the access to be able to look it up, to talk about it, to understand its significance.
To talk about orthographic study with kids is really, really a huge access point, I think, in literacy, starting young, and especially as you get to trickier things in second and third grade.
Shannon Betts: It helps me to, like see, almost reframe my job position, too, in that I'm not just a reading teacher, I'm an English teacher.
English teacher. So it is important for me to understand this as a English [00:16:00] teacher to sort of understand the path that our English language has taken to understand some of its irregular irregularities and that there's a purpose for them. And that Because I need to, you know, convey that English code to my students.
And it's not just a sound symbol code. English is much more than just a sound symbol code. So I think I want to take the conversation there. It's just sort of let's talk about what kind of writing system is English. We've talked about the book Logic of English before. That's another great reference. But Rachel, give us some insight into what kind of writing system is English.
Is it logical? Why, Why was it set up the way it is?
MindfulTeacherRachel: Yeah, so I posted this a couple times before and I actually got some, like, flack for it. But, and I forget where I first read this, but this idea that English is actually a morphophonemic language, that it has this morphology component as well.[00:17:00] And you can see that as early as introducing the morpheme s at the end of words and knowing that that's plural and sometimes it's pronounced zz if it comes after a voiced sound.
And so understanding that, like, that's a piece that carries meaning. It doesn't necessarily sound exactly like it's spelled. But we all know that if something's plural, you add an S to it. So this idea of this combination of morphology and and phonology. And I like to say that etymology and morphology go hand in hand.
There's a huge overlap there because there's so many things like, you know, the Latin prefixes and suffixes, the Greek prefixes and suffixes, as you get to more advanced words, even as you talk about things like biology, chemistry, that you know, that kinds of stuff. things. I talk about that a lot with my kids when we start talking about polygons, shapes, you know, what does [00:18:00] octagon mean?
Okay, well, we have the part octa, we have the part gone. What do those parts mean? What does that tell you about the shape? And so, you know, really expanding beyond the fact that English is just a sound spelling language, and I think that also works to demystify this idea that English is so irregular.
No, it's not. We have this phonology piece that's really important, but we also have this meaning piece that's really important, and kind of embedded in this meaning piece is this word origin idea as well. I saw this I think her username is Laura loves teaching. She's, does Orton Gillingham training through IMSC and she makes a lot of really cool videos, especially about etymology.
And one of the things she made at one point was a, an English language cake. And like at the top of the English cake was Greek. And then there was like Latin and Roman. And then there was like, [00:19:00] Middle Ages English, old English, and then there's current English. So talking about all these layers of the cake and kind of going back up the cake to see the language of origin.
I just thought it was so cool. So I actually showed that graphic to my kids. I was like you know, where do you think in English this word came from or in the development of English over time? And, you know, they could point out, Oh, like. You said this was from Latin. That's really cool. You must be from this layer of the cake.
That's a really old word. Things like that. And so having that idea that English is so much more than just a, you know, phonological language, I think gives kids and us a lot more access and understanding to why there's so many quote unquote irregularities. Because you're right, not everything, Spelled like it sounds, but it can be explained pretty simply if we add morphology and [00:20:00] etymology into the conversation.
Mary Saghafi: I think it also helps kids understand the global world a little bit more too, and that not everyone speaks the same language. And maybe you might have a few friends you know, in a classroom that do speak a different language, or maybe it's a very homogenous population, and this is a really important way of introducing it.
But also, if you have a student who does speak another language, It's a really great way of helping introduce them and feel included with their maybe home language and, and talking about, oh, there are some some English words that actually do have roots in this, or you know, Spanish words also have Latin roots.
with them too. So we could start to kind of find the commonalities between some of these words. So there's so many vast ways of like going down the rabbit hole of this, which I think is a really beautiful thing, especially when you have such eager learners. And I think that it really depends on the enthusiasm of the teacher as well.
You know, [00:21:00] in this piece, it's a very scientific teaching, but it's also an art to get kids excited about it. And so this is where, like, I think that bridge of teaching being an art and a science really, really comes together. The other part that I think is really important to kind of reiterate too, is that, If you can understand the structure of the words understanding that our pronunciation is different and what the pronunciation and the the graphemes that match the, that pronunciation can be, so like, ed as an ending is another really good example that we can have ed sounds like ed, d, and t, depending on how you voice or don't voice that consonant at the end of The base word, so I think that this is really an important conversation that dives deep into our English language instruction really cool.
Shannon Betts: And I think that it just makes, I think I'm just going to really emphasize to students that, like, instead of being frustrated. [00:22:00] But your regular spellings, we need to be grateful for them because like the author of beneath the surface of the words gives an example of like, what if park the car was spelled the way other people maybe in Boston said it, you know, like park the car, like, that was a horrible I'm sorry to our listeners in Boston.
But like, you know, it might be spelled P O K or something for park, and then we wouldn't be able to understand each other, like our different dialects of English, or we have a lot of English speaking countries all around the globe, and like, we wouldn't be able to understand each other's written language if we didn't have consistent spellings.
And so just reiterating that there's a reason for consistent spelling. And a lot of the, some of that reason might be because of etymology. It might not be because of etymology. It might be because of morphology reasons. But etymology does, like what you said, Rachel, it just goes hand in hand. And that it gives us some more reasoning behind a certain Spelling of a word.[00:23:00]
And they're fun. Like, I love the history. Like another one that was mentioned I told y'all about the yell, L and yoke. But another one that was mentioned in the book was story. So his story, like a tale is from the word history. So that makes sense. And then, you know, and the other. Ancient languages, histoire in French.
And so that makes sense. But what about a story in a building like the second story or the third story? It's from old middle age buildings that had more than one story. They were painted pictures in the windows. And so it might be like a new story. On the second floor of the building and then there might be a new story told on the pictures of the third floor of the building.
And so that's why they call it the stories. The floors of a building and that's just so pretty. I can picture this like old ancient house with like this old paint on this, you know, ancient glass. And I just, it just now I understand why it's called a story.
Mary Saghafi: Such a cool example. I love that one.
Definitely never heard that. [00:24:00] That's really so I know that we have some examples of etymology. com and we have some book recommendations like once upon a word as an as a dictionary. Are there any other like go to, I guess Shannon also mentioned the book Word Origins but what other go to teaching resources can we recommend?
MindfulTeacherRachel: So I worked with some of my structured literacy friends and we made kind of like a, a grid of SOR TBR books, science of reading to be read books. And we have several in the section, we have a morphology vocabulary section and then we also just have an etymology section and a lot of the ones we talked about are In there.
So, but that's a really cool. I just, every time I find a book, I add it there cause I used to just have a big. list of science of reading books. And I felt like [00:25:00] I needed them. At first I put them in the five pillars of reading and then I was like, I need more categories than that. And so some of the really cool etymology ones, like we talked about beneath the surface of words, word origins, there's a bunch by this author named David Crystal.
He does Kind of even deeper linguist stuff. One is called A Little Book of Language and one is called Spell It Out, which is really about that orthographic study. Why is it spelled that way? There's another one called Highly Irregular, which is definitely a play on like, hey, you thought these were irregular, but actually etymology, which are really cool.
And then Morphology, there's this one called building vocabulary using Greek and Latin roots, and that's a really cool one too, because with, with these Greek and Latin roots, in addition to previous prefixes and suffixes, you not [00:26:00] only have this layer of etymology in there, but there's also. morphology in there which just tells you so much about the history of the word and what that word means, why it's spelled that way that those languages just have such a huge influence on our language and helping kids understand that.
Really, you know, not only helps their spelling, but just helps them understand English in the world and how it's developed, where it's come from. It gives them a very good historical sense, I think, of our language especially in a country where we are predominantly English speakers and, you know, especially if you work with a homogenous group of children, they kind of talk the same way.
It gives them, I think, a little more appreciation and Knowledge of things like dialect, things like accents in different places things like, you know, understanding people [00:27:00] who are translanguaging and using parts of English and kind of appreciating that and understanding how cool that is that we're able to do that with English.
So. That's a really, really cool thing too. And then of course we talked a lot about edm online, which is basically Webster's, but it's just word origin. I think that's, you know, I probably use that at least once a day, every day. It's one of my most visited websites. It's like on the homepage of my Safari on my phone, because I literally look up a word constantly.
And that's a great one too. If you have a kid who comes up to you, who has, you know, read a word at home or whatever, and they're like, Hey, I'm going to stump you with this one. Why is. this spelled this way. And you can be like, okay, well, let's look it up. I also like let kids kind of, [00:28:00] you know, once I search it on my computer or whatever, teach them about the different, cause they know how to use a dictionary.
So teaching them about like how to use that reference book is really cool as well. So that they are, you know, early linguists, scholars that can look up that kind of thing for themselves as well.
Shannon Betts: Yeah. And beneath the surface of words in her appendix I think it's appendix B, she explains how to read an entry on adding.
Eddie online. com. And I appreciate that because I used to read it as just sort of a dictionary entry and I was not understanding the word origin completely. And so she was explaining like that it's, it's written in a very specific ways that you understand the flow of the word path and that it's taken.
And that it also, if they say, see this other. Root see this other entry that you must read that other entry in order to understand the full history of that word or else you're going to walk away with an incomplete understanding. I will say I also learned from reading that book that a literacy hero, Doug Harper is the one [00:29:00] who runs that website and he runs it completely as a volunteer for free.
And so If we ever want to give him a cup of coffee or something, like they take, it runs entirely on donations. So I'm going to link that on the show notes and thank him myself. He says in the opening of the website that this is a map of the wheel ruts of modern English. And I just love that. I love that visual of just sort of the English in the, you know, carriage making those wheel ruts in the mud on the old road in England, and then sort of understanding like, okay, what words maybe go on a different path than those like traditional words.
You also mentioned too that about roots. And it's so important that we understand these roots because a lot of our students kind of get stuck in that like second, third grade level of reading and they just cannot advance. And a lot of the reason is because of vocabulary and comprehension. And it's because of not understanding those roots enough.
And so like, for example, [00:30:00] if we show the students the etymology of spect. That it means look, and then so all the words that you can make that are related to spect, like prospect, perspective, and spectacle, and I mean, just there's so many, introspective, and all of those, that is just adding to their vocabulary.
Infinitely. And that's where we bring them to the next level in their understanding of English. And then when they learn one root and work in a word sum and do some work with that, they can add many, many, many words. And then they also learn the process of it so that then they can add to their own word study themselves as they're coming in into unfamiliar words that they might encounter in like a chapter book or something.
MindfulTeacherRachel: Exactly. Well, and then another Research that resource that I used a lot. His Twitter is sounds and syllables and he, he does love him, but he has all these [00:31:00] matrixes. So they're basically like word sums squared where it's like, it's on Mondays, right? He gives one every, yes, he does one a week and there's a part of his website that's an archive of these matrices of different roots and.
What's cool about the matrices is that it shows like every possible combo with this root that you could make in a word. So it's not just the word sum of one word, it's everything. So that really links stuff together. And you can, for my kids, a huge word matrix is like not, they're not there yet. But, If you even know a couple of prefixes that can go with a root, you can kind of make your own little mini combo of word stems as you teach them roots.
So that's a really cool reference point. archives like are free and you can download the PDF of them. So I literally have them like [00:32:00] saved on my computer to reference if I ever need to like look them up for a kid or if in like a tutoring session we're looking at that specific group and we're building the word matrix together or like reading through the matrix so that they can like find all the word sums, which is a really, really fun activity.
And that definitely bridges that morphological etymological connection for sure. In a fun way that doesn't feel like, you know, if you're a struggling reader, like you said, like stuck at that second, third grade level, going back and doing this like phonics stuff is not. It doesn't feel very good and and that's not what they need.
Doing this more advanced in depth vocab study that incorporates their phonics knowledge but allows them to explore morphology and etymology is just a really engaging way for them to exponentially build that and be able to apply that [00:33:00] as they read trickier and trickier academic texts. So that's a really cool program.
thing that I've done in tutoring with older kids when, you know, the traditional OG, like, multi sensory thing was, like, a little bit too young for them. They, they mastered phonics. They, but the thing that they were stuck on was this bigger picture of the morphophonemic aspect of language and being able to apply that for academic vocab and more advanced text.
Shannon Betts: And it's not just vocabulary, it's spelling instruction. Exactly. And we know, like, spelling is a, poor spelling is an epidemic.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah, definitely. I think, too, we're, you're capitalizing on the orthographic mapping with this. It's just more advanced. So students who may not have mastered that at a, you know, in the earlier grades, they still have this, like, hardwired capability of orthographic mapping.
You're just teaching [00:34:00] word chunks. Related to meaning, which is really what we're still doing in the younger grades too, but now they have they have a An anchor to tie it to this is meaning this is a bigger word. I've come across this word in a textbook that I really struggled after or I've heard my teacher say this word.
Oh, I, I can make this connection on my own. And not only that, then it starts to improve their own writing and it gives them. Access and what we're really doing with that spelling instruction is giving them access to so many more words.
Shannon Betts: So this is, yeah, the beneath the surface, the word she suggests, like, like she was giving an example, like students who were struggling with metal, like an Olympic medal versus metal, like, you know, gold and silver.
And she was saying if you know that you can't always hear that D and that T. And so she says, sometimes it makes more sense to like go bigger, because the. Pronunciation becomes more clear when you actually get to a multisyllabic word. So she says for metal, teach [00:35:00] them metallic. Cause you can hear that T in metallic and in metal, if you teach them medallion, you can hear that D.
And so then all of a sudden you've also added other words and thinking, okay, well, what other words, you know, have metal and medallion and, and, and can I think of some other ones that, you know, I can add to this word matrix to just sort of build that She calls it like, it's, she calls it word families, but it's different than like a word family, like the og, you know, like, you know, dog, log, bog, or whatever.
This is like a meaning word family where they all have the same what she calls an orthographic denominator denotator, which is that like spect, like that, that's very specific root. A lot of times that has etymological History, and that if they create a family among that, that one little root that they can just build so many words from there, and then [00:36:00] they'll start to see patterns to of how suffixes can sort of follow a certain pattern with if you change it from a.
From an adjective to a noun, they're usually going to, you know, have that same change in suffix and things like that. And then as you change those word sums the pronunciation changes. And so when they're just trying to sound out the word and spell it based on the sounds, they're going to make some sound spelling mistakes.
But if they have that meaning, and they've understood, they have that foundation of understanding that the spelling comes from the meaning, then they are more likely to include that base of the spelling in the, you know, that root spelling in their spelling, even if they don't hear a certain sound.
Mary Saghafi: This is definitely one of those episodes where we're just dropping all these little nuggets of information and I think that that's so important to our listeners and we get a lot of feedback about that. So I think that that's really great. So let's focus on a couple big ideas, more [00:37:00] nuggets that we can kind of share with our listeners.
And if we haven't explained this in a little while the goal of our podcast is really. To have some like professional development, sometimes bigger professional development, but something that you could really take with you and apply either that day or that week or, or inspire you to kind of move forward.
So with that being said Rachel, you're so good at this. So what ideas do you think that we can, like, share right now?
MindfulTeacherRachel: Some more nuggets. I think one thing is to not be. Scared of etymology. I think it feels really big. I think it feels especially uncomfortable if you're an early literacy teacher, like K through two.
And I just want to say that it's something that our kids can start to access. And even if we're not having advanced discussions about Latin roots in kindergarten, like, that's not expected at all. But laying the seeds of like, [00:38:00] you know, oh, this word is from Greek origin and this is how I know that. That can really set kids up to do some of these advanced things that we're talking about.
Talking about as they get more and more into their understanding of reading and spelling and also just their understanding of English as a language. And so I don't want teachers to feel daunted or afraid to kind of. Research this, use the resources like Edamonline, use the resources like the Word Origin Dictionary, Once Upon a Word and kind of lay the foundation of this historical implication of spellings and meanings in English as a tool rather than as something that makes English really difficult to teach to kids to them.
Read and write and speak. So I think that that's a really kind of key takeaway here. Because it's not. I have bigger, you know, etymology [00:39:00] conversations with some of my older tutoring students. It's not an everyday thing that I do in my first grade classroom, but it's definitely an underlying conversation that we have throughout our, you know, History lessons throughout our vocabulary discussions and throughout even as they learn more advanced phonological patterns and phoneme grapheme pairs, they, they have this understanding of.
Oh, there's this historical layer of English, and this is why it's spelled this way, and I'm going to remember that, as opposed to, hey, this is, that's just tricky, like, that is not memorable to kids, because a lot of things are tricky when you're six, like, tying your shoes is tricky, you know it just, I feel like it opens a door For sure.
And in terms of spelling and in terms being of kids being able to [00:40:00] speak about language and in kids being able to, you know, negotiate their own curiosities about language and as they're learning to read and write.
Mary Saghafi: I think that's so spot on. I'm happy to share to that. You know, there are some times that you come across in life where you're like, I have never heard that before. And so I will never forget like in high school someone said like white on rice. I was like, I have never heard that before. And it just, I remember very clearly and distinctly, like I did not understand that idiom.
And so fairly recently, or like, you know, when you mix up song lyrics and all that good stuff. So once again, I've come across one and I had not heard of the scribal O. It had never crossed my path in life. And so don't forget that sometimes there are things that don't cross your path in life. So we have kind of [00:41:00] like.
Shannon and I have talked a little bit more about the scribal O and kind of like gone down the rabbit hole, but are you comfortable, Rachel, with sharing a little bit of information about the scribal O to our listeners?
MindfulTeacherRachel: Yes that's one of my kids favorite ones because it's so common in, like, very high frequency words.
So it's this idea that O is spelling the short U sound, and I guess I used to think that it was a schwa. That was one of the things that, like, when we were preparing, was the question, like, is it just schwa? And it's actually one thing that I talk about when I teach the words from and come and some is I show, like, monk writing.
Like, I show a picture of, I think it's called, like, black gothic hand or something. This font that's, like, the typical monk scribe writing. And if you write the word Like, [00:42:00] sum, in that word, s u m, like you spell it like that. You can't tell the difference between where, like, the u stops and the m starts, because the, the shape, it's called a minim, m i n i m, of, like, kind of basically this wiggly back and forth, blends so...
Fluently with a lot of those letters that were the lower, the lower case letters hit the midline. And so instead they kind of changed it to an O in their monk writing so that you could tell that the word was from instead of like, is that word? Rune? Is that a W in there? You just couldn't tell what it was supposed to be based on the font that they're doing.
And we talked about how, you know, this was before the printing press. This was, they're having to handwrite everything. [00:43:00] And, you know, it was really impossible to read. People are still, Learning and understanding the written forms not everybody can read and so they had to make it more accessible. And so, my kids like to, they don't learn cursive until second grade at my school but they like to Do their little made up cursive and be like, look at my, you can't tell that this is a, a U in my little scribe in my cursive.
So I have to make it an O. And they, they love that story. They think that's so funny because we do learn about them. A printing press and the, I, I had just learned this like two years ago, how the, we call it uppercase and lowercase because the capital letters were in the uppercase of stamps for the printer press.
And the, the lowercase letters are in the lowercase of stamps for the printing press, like in the actual briefcase that you carry around the stamps in. I, I just learned that. [00:44:00] And so my kids would always get confused if someone said, Uppercase versus capital, but now they understand that. Because history and language go hand in hand and I, I love to teach that.
And so that's a conversation that I do have at ScribbleO is a conversation that I do have with my first graders because they're learning to read and spell those words. Some and. And from, and also a lot of those words have homonyms or homophones too, because there's some like S U M, like we're going to add it in addition and they can read and spell that and use that word in conversation.
And they, there's also ones that sound similar, like son, like, okay, we. See the sun in the sky or sun, like you're my son and you're my father. And so understanding that and giving them. You know, access to why it's spelled that way, it really helps them [00:45:00] differentiate between those words that really sound quite similar.
And you're like, why do they mean different things? Why are they spelled this way? It makes no sense. And of course they really liked the visual of the, the monk handwriting. They think that's so cool, especially because they really like the idea of cursive, I love,
Mary Saghafi: The idea. Of like a child going home and be like mom and dad.
Guess what? I can prove to you why some is spelled s o n e and being able to like share those stories like that is an ideal conversation that you would love for your students to take with you to have that. And so like for me as a teacher, I'm like, just imagining like, that's my challenge at the end of the day.
Prove your parents why this is the case. And I think that The way that you are so great about rooting things in, in story form and making it so accessible to kids. I think it just, it makes so much sense to teachers. And you do it in such a, an easy accessible [00:46:00] way. So I love these stories and these little tidbits.
So thank you so much for sharing. Always open for more.
MindfulTeacherRachel: That means so much. That's kind of, I guess, my goal of like social media and, and sharing kind of my teaching journey is. How can we make these things accessible to teachers and to kids because they're really so meaningful and can help so much in terms of reading and spelling and just understanding school and life.
Shannon Betts: Are there other big patterns like that that you could teach students besides the Scribble Loom?
MindfulTeacherRachel: So another one that we do talk about in first grade is the Sound spelled PH and we talk about the Greek origin there. And again, we do that with meaning pieces in our lessons about the shapes when we do polygons.
Because we talk about like what is, [00:47:00] what is defining about a polygon? What, what does that word mean, polygon? And so what does a shape have to have in order for it to be called a polygon? Oh, well, it has to have multiple, poly means multiple sides. And so it can't be a circle because that doesn't go with the word polygon.
And so having them really understand, oh, you know, here's this. Prefix poly. What does that mean? Solidifies their math understanding in a way that I had trouble getting them to realize before I started teaching the morphology and etymology of those pieces. of polygon and hexagon and septagon, you know, before I really broke those down for them, they were having trouble understanding what was and was not a polygon.
That was just a really silly word. They were having trouble remembering that word. I'd ask them, I'd show them like a random shape that was a polygon, but it wasn't necessarily a [00:48:00] regular polygon. And I'd ask them, like, what could you call this shape? And they were like, Like they didn't have that word, but then last year we were really intentional.
I feel like last year was the first year where we were super intentional about that prefix and gone as a root and the different numbers of sides. They did not forget that word. They were really, really keen on that word. They would draw a shape that was an irregular polygon, but they could tell you, Oh, this is a, this is a polygon, and I'd ask them why, and they'd say, Well, look how it has, you know, multiple sides, it's closed, you know.
It just really solidified their understanding in a subject that you wouldn't think would be related to them understanding the meaning of, or the history of the word polygon. But they were so much better at geometry because we had that conversation.
Shannon Betts: So I was going to ask you, like, should we teach these kids?
When should we teach this to students? [00:49:00] And I think you just brought up a real, like, Start of an answer to that is look at areas in your curriculum of like when you have to teach certain words like you had to teach polygon in your math vocabulary. If there's certain words you have to teach in your science or your social studies curriculum, those might be great entry points into when to bring up etymology and you could take a math lesson and then integrate some language into it.
So I love that and that I'm going to look at my curriculum that way, because we don't have a curriculum for this. And so do we spend a ton of teaching time on this? Do we just do it in the moment? Like, what is a good way to approach this as a homeroom teacher or as a tutor or as a, you know, resource teacher like I am?
MindfulTeacherRachel: I can think of two. Good idea. So the first thing that I do is with our high frequency words, I have them sorted by sound. And those are the ones where you're [00:50:00] really going to say like, Oh, this is a regular, right? But those really common high frequency words are often very old and they have a lot of historical context there.
They have, some etymological features there that are really helpful to know. So in addition to sorting them by sound, it's helpful to sort them by etymology or morphology. So again, I teach the words some and come and from together and We learn those in one group, and when we do spelling, we also group those all together.
So that's something to think about. So if you're already grouping high frequency words by sound, and that's how you're teaching them, add that etymology. Why can I not say that anymore? I couldn't say it either. Why?
Shannon Betts: Etymology piece.
MindfulTeacherRachel: Add that etymology piece too when you're laying out that scope and sequence of how to [00:51:00] teach that, when to teach that.
And then another thing, like with the polygon, think about the academic vocabulary that you need your kids to have, especially for your science and social studies curriculum pieces. And even, like with polygon in math, And then think about, like, you know, a great, a great one in math, if you're doing measurement, and you have all the prefixes for the metric system, centi, milli, all those things and then build words on centipede.
Okay, what does that mean? That kind of stuff. Think about those really important Tier two vocabulary words that are really important for kids to be able to access content, especially as they get later and later and more advanced into math and science and social studies and dive deep there because it may not feel like Morphology or etymology is necessarily related to the end goal of what you want students to be able to do, like the things that I [00:52:00] expected students to do with shapes were far beyond what they understood about polygons, but having that solid understanding of just that word gave them the springboard to access so much more and to talk about so much more and to remember that word in a much more meaningful sense.
And that's a word that will carry with them throughout their school career. So really choose those tier two and I mean even domain specific if you have domain specific science and social studies words that have etymological weight think about Incorporating that it's, it's not a, a long ad to have that conversation.
I, for our polygon conversation, I swear it was like maybe 15 minutes of that first math lesson of that day. And then we kind of retouched on it throughout that unit, but it just made all the difference in our students being able to talk about that, understand it and apply it to their knowledge about.
[00:53:00] Geometry so far. So that's another piece to that the high frequency word piece and then the tier two or domain specific vocabulary words that have etymological meaning or etymological layers as well.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah, I'm going to add on to the tutoring piece too if you don't mind a little bit because I think Tutoring provides this really unique opportunity to one, either capitalize on high interests that your student might have.
So you can do that outside of the academic vocabulary and really dive into a high interest subject. But also this is a great way to kind of end the lesson or build a lesson and gamify it. So it could be challenged me with this word. Let's break down this word. Let's find out what the word origin is of it, or Your assignment for the next tutoring session is to find me the longest word that you can think of or a new word that you've heard.
And then the last five minutes you go into adam. com and you kind of break down and you teach your [00:54:00] student how to master this word and master the word origin of it. And so I think that, you know, like. I love that when you have your students come in and challenge you like, Oh, I've got a word to stump you like as a tutor.
I think that's a really great way to kind of like capitalize on this. The interest of the student or like, Oh, my tutor is so smart. I'm going to try to trick that person. And so I think that kids thrive on stuff like that. So. I think those are super great ideas.
Shannon Betts: And then that's just my little add on with Mary in the beneath the surface of words like she, I think she works with tutoring students too.
She didn't say that specifically, but she was talking about she looked at the students spelling errors, a lot as entries into when to develop into this etymology. And for example the student didn't know how to spell bacon. And wanted to spell bacon with an I N at the end, and so she wasn't sure why it was O N, and so they delved [00:55:00] into it together and realized that a ton of food related words came from French origins and had that O N at the end, like glutton and cinnamon and apron and so many others.
And so a lot of times that etymology will explain the schwa. In multi syllable words, and then you can attach that story to it. You know, it's like, O N, food. Okay, food has a O, O, O in it. Okay, I remember, like, let me try the O N rather than the I N if it's a food related word and see if that's the way to spell it.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah, perfect. I think that's a super great example. Exactly what we're talking about. I can't wait to dive into this book. I'm a little jealous that you guys have all this knowledge and I'm just hanging on right now. So don't worry. That's my challenge. I'll take it on. I'll drop it in your mailbox later.
Yes, please.
Shannon Betts: Nerd alert. Welcome to the reading teacher's lounge.
MindfulTeacherRachel: Love it. I love it. No, I love it when my kids are like, my kids are total [00:56:00] language nerds. I mean, I told you, they fight over the dictionary and I'm like, That's what I love to see. I love to see that I'm building these little linguist experts, because they will come to me like, years later, and say like, Hey, did you know this word?
And I'm like, how do you know this word? You're eight!
Shannon Betts: Like, She also mentioned there's a, there's a website called the word searcher, and she ended up using this, this, this thing to search for, are there other food words that have O N in it? And so we're going to link that to our show notes, because then she like looked at the frequency of, at the end of words, is it more likely to be spelled O N or I N, even though it sounds like I N, and she found from doing that research that it was mostly O N.
MindfulTeacherRachel: So that's super cool.
Shannon Betts: And so what we could do is in those moments kind of just like take a note of it. We if we have the time with the student we can look at it in the moment and if not, we could. [00:57:00] look into it later. I tell that story at the very beginning of the podcast seasons where I had delved into my like total map, deep dive, map testing deep dive because of a question that one student asked me and that ended up becoming like a mission of mine for like years.
But So we could go in and look at it our own and once we start to see that this reveals understanding about multiple spelling patterns, that's when we can also decide that, okay, this is worth a conversation and a mini lesson with students because then they can apply this to multiple spelling situations.
So The show notes for this episode are going to be highly valuable. We have a character limit too, so I'm going to do as many, I'm going to try to put as many as we can in there, but Buzzsprout sometimes tells me, like, you've added too many, you don't have any more characters left.
Mary Saghafi: Maybe what we can do then is add some more on social media too, and we'll, we'll make sure you, we link you.
Remember Mindful Teacher Rachel. So if you haven't followed Mindful Teacher Rachel, you definitely should. [00:58:00] She's fantastic. But we'll link to you with some
Shannon Betts: So anything else you think we need to mention about etymology while we've got you on air, Rachel?
MindfulTeacherRachel: I think we've really covered a lot. It's obviously a very, very big topic.
I feel like we could go on forever with stories of why words are spelled the way they are, with examples of how to incorporate this in your teaching and also Oh, just like reasons why it's important. But I think what's really cool is that this might open the door for some people to feel like they can try and have these conversations with the students, or maybe just with other teachers on their team, like.
Hey, can we talk about this when we're talking about this topic in science? I think this would add another layer to students understanding. And what's great is because there are so many resources like EdmOnline, like this cool word searcher thing that I'm probably going to do for the next hour after we talk you can really kind of, again, go with student interest, go with[00:59:00] The topics that you're teaching in science, social studies, math, you know, interdisciplinary music at art.
So that's, that's really cool. It's, it's almost like a choose your own adventure of how to really beef up your vocabulary. Instruction. You know, in addition to your spelling and your reading and your English and your other subjects instruction as well, which is super, super cool.
Shannon Betts: Like I said, I'm going to reframe it instead of calling something an irregular spelling.
I'm really going to reframe it as an irregular pronunciation. Yes. And that there's a reason it's spelt this way. There's a history behind the spelling and that it's giving us a lot of information and pronunciation changes over time. We add more schwa words probably to English every single year, especially here in the south when we speak so quickly.
And spelling doesn't so stress. And so you know, when we're stressing a syllable or when we're not and when we're rushing a sound or when we're not but we can't change that spelling because then we wouldn't be able to [01:00:00] communicate. And so we just need to understand that spelling,
but a super great topic. I love this. Thank you so much.
Mary Saghafi: We appreciate you joining us in the reading teachers lounge again, and you're always welcome back. And we'll make sure that we post some of your new books too. So that our listeners can also share their stories with them, their students too.
MindfulTeacherRachel: Amazing. Thank you guys for having me.