For The Love Of Literacy
For the Love of Literacy provides podcasts about the exciting advances in literacy instruction, from morphology and orthography (the spelling system), to meaningful sight word memorization, and sentence construction and comprehension. We focus on the often overlooked aspects of literacy and their links to language development.
We tie learning to read, spell and writing to their roots in spoken language. This makes teaching and learning these abilities much easier because literacy learning is driven by language learning. The major components of spoken language plus vocabulary knowledge strongly predicting and largely determining growth in reading, spelling and writing.
Our guests are not just knowledgeable the links between language and language but know how to implement this learning in the classroom.
You will hear from noted researchers including Linnea Ehri, Marcia Henry and Peter Bowers as well as teachers who have developed lessons that engage students and enrich language abilities. Check back weekly to discover more Fulfilling Literacy Lessons and Clarifying conversations. Feel free to reach out to me at Bruce@ReadingShift.com.
For The Love Of Literacy
Students Who Are Fascinated By Words & Sentences - Mary Beth Steven, Lisa Barnett, Skot Caldwell
Three experienced teachers show how to get even your most resistant students to become fascinated by words and sentences. They explain how to turn memory-draining spelling homework into an activity that enriches vocabulary, sight word mapping and provides a deep understanding of how words are constructed. If morphology and the English spelling system doesn't make sense to you and your students, they will by the end of the podcast.
Mary Beth, Lisa and Skot explain how structured word inquiry, a method developed by Peter Bowers, gets students deeply involved in investigations of a word's spelling, meaning and history. They describe how students with reading and behavior problems become fascinated by word investigations that significantly boosts their reading, spelling and comprehension abilities.
Too many reading methods don't emphasize the importance of sentence writing and comprehension, which limits their students literacy abilities. Mary Beth, Lisa and Skot explain how sentence investigations excite students as much as word inquiry. Understanding how sentences are composed of phrases reveals its meaning. Drawing students' attention to the relationships between words and phrases significantly boost comprehension--and interest, too.
Skot Caldwell has worked for more than 25 years in “high needs” public schools in Kingston, Ontario. After annually reinventing his “spelling” program and having found nothing really effective, he met Pete Bowers and joined him on a learning journey through Real Spelling and the development of Structured Word Inquiry. For the next twenty years, his classroom was a kind of laboratory, in which he and his students were “Word Scientists” together. Since retiring, Skot has taught teachers at Queen’s University and now works as a literacy consultant and climate action facilitator.
https://smallhumansthinkbig.wordpress.com/category/word-inquiry/ skotcaldwell@hotmail.com
Lisa Barnett is a literacy-focused educator with over 30 years of experience in general and special education, where she dramatically changed the trajectory of her students by altering her instructional approach to literacy. She is the founder and director of Empower Learning Center where she tutors privately, consults, and trains educators worldwide in English orthography. She is the author of Vocabulary & Morphology using Structured Word Inquiry. There is a wonderful For the love of Literacy Podcast about this very practical book.
Links to Lisa & Katie’s book, SWI resources, dyslexia resources, blog about SWI & more. Lisa offers a few workshops, Morphology & More, Intro to SWI, and Unpacking Etymology – registration links are on the website.
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/empowerlc
Website: https://www.seethebeautyindyslexia.com/elc.html
Blog: https://barnettsbuzzingblog.edublogs.org/
Email: EmpowerLC.lisa@gmail.com
Mary Beth Steven is a retired public school teacher whose teaching took a dramatic turn once she discovered Structured Word Inquiry. In the beginning, she didn’t dwell on what she didn’t know or which student questions she wouldn’t be able to answer, but rather on what she and her students would learn together! As it turned out, the consistent process for word investigations with SWI complime