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Why Morphology Matters for Word Reading and More with Melissa Orkin and Alex Osburn

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Episode 238 

What if the “secret sauce” to reading big words isn’t just syllables, but also morphemes? In this episode, Melissa Orkin and Alex Osburn share why morphology is essential, especially in grades 3–6, and how it bridges word reading, vocabulary, and comprehension.

They dig into practical strategies for teaching morphology, from explicit routines to vocabulary activities like the Frayer model, and show how to weave it all into real texts so students connect meaning to print in powerful ways. You’ll hear how morphology instruction can be integrated with content areas, supported by oral language practice, and used to spark stronger engagement and deeper learning.

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Lori:

As a teacher, I have definitely had moments when students hit a tough word in a text and just freeze.

Melissa:

Absolutely those big tricky words. They just like stop students right in their tracks. And I don't know about you, lori, but for me it was tough to know, like how to help them navigate those tough words. And so today we're talking about something that can really help, which is morphology. Not only does it help students break down and decode words, but it helps grow their vocabulary and understand what they're reading.

Lori:

We are joined by two amazing experts, Melissa Orkin and Alex Osborne. They help make morphology approachable, practical and even fun to teach. We love fun morphology. This conversation is packed with ideas we know you'll want to take straight back to your classroom or school. Hi, teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa:

We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.

Lori:

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.

Melissa:

Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi, Melissa and Alex, welcome to the podcast. Welcome back, Melissa and Alex. Welcome for the first time.

Melissa Orkin:

Well, we are so honored to be here. Thanks for having us back by popular demand, right.

Melissa:

Absolutely, and we are so excited to talk to you today about morphology, which you all call the secret sauce in upper elementary reading, so we're excited to hear about why that is and what that means All right.

Lori:

So we've been talking so much about teaching multisyllabic words and we've learned that relying on syllable division alone is not always reliable and that morphology is super helpful for students to read bigger words. So, Melissa, why don't you kick us off by sharing how we teach morphology in a way that sticks?

Melissa Orkin:

Okay. So, yes, I couldn't agree more, Lori. So morphology is this really incredible aspect of language that bridges decoding and comprehension, because it provides insights not only about the pronunciation of a chunk of the word but also about the meaning, and so it can help us with figuring out unfamiliar words and it can help us with overall fluency and comprehension when we're reading longer text. So the work on morphological destruction has been developing. So the work on morphological destruction has been developing. I mean, morphology has long been studied by a number of different linguists in the field, so that includes folks like Pete Bowers and Marsha Henry and William Van Cleave, and there has been, more recently, some research on, like what works, how do we teach morphology? By and large, the studies have looked at three different types of instruction. The first type of instruction is what we would think of as implicit instruction, that's, using things like games and sorting activities, like what you would imagine students might be doing at independent sort of stations or, like you know, kind of desk work, in order to improve their word recognition skills. The second type of instruction has been focused more on explicit instruction, and this involves directly teaching a morpheme like a prefix or a suffix, like the prefix re or the suffix full or the root word track and teaching the meaning of those prefixes and suffixes and how to pronounce them, and then providing some practice. And that practice usually comes in the form of individual words and so that really helps the students with the word recognition. But it doesn't always include the application to connect to text or giving students an opportunity to kind of generalize their skills. So if you know the word retract, will you figure out other words with re in them? Word retract, will you figure out other words with re in them? And then the third strategy that had been explored is this idea of morphological problem solving, so that's, students' ability to kind of infer independently, Like if you know the suffix hood, could you figure out unknown words that have that in them.

Melissa Orkin:

And this was sort of a really interesting study that I just want to share with you very briefly. It was done several years ago and what they wanted to know, what the researchers wanted to know this was Anglin and colleagues. What they wanted to know is if students are able to take morphemes that they know, so prefixes and suffixes and if they're able to use those known morphemes to figure out new vocabulary words. So they found that between first through fifth graders the fifth graders were the most able to engage in this process independently. It was more problematic for the younger students, but even among the fifth grade students it got kind of dicey. So they had the interviewers walk through the generalizing approach that the students were using and they wrote down the transcripts of what the students said. So I just want to share with you one quick transcript to kind of show you where the breakdown might occur in this process.

Melissa Orkin:

So this student is being asked to define the word priesthood.

Melissa Orkin:

So the interviewer says what does the word priesthood mean? And the student says well, I know what a priest is. It's like a pastor or someone, and hood like childhood. And the interviewer encourages them. And then the student says well, maybe when you grow up you have a good childhood and priesthood. Like you might grow up when you're a child with a priest and you'll have a good priesthood and you'll know lots of stuff from the Bible and everything. And so then the interviewer says well, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Are you saying if you're a child, you grow up with a priest and that's priesthood? And the child says yep, so you can see that like they had a piece of it.

Melissa Orkin:

They had the hood piece, they had the priest, but they weren't sure how those go together and how they're related to childhood.

Melissa Orkin:

So they were trying to use some inductive reasoning to generalize, but it broke down.

Melissa Orkin:

And the reason it broke down is because the student did not have the explicit information about what hood can mean as a suffix.

Melissa Orkin:

So hood can have two meanings. The first meaning is it can mean like the condition of so they were onto it with childhood, adulthood, the condition of being a child, the condition of being adult. But they didn't have the second meaning. And the second meaning is that hood can also mean members of a definable group. So, for example, priesthood means members of being the clergy right or a neighborhood or members of a particular geographic area. So what the researchers found was that although the morphological problem solving engages the students like metalinguistic knowledge and they're generalizing, it doesn't go far enough to ensure that they have all of the correct information about either the pronunciation of the prefix suffix or root, or the meaning of it. So what we have done in our work with educators is we've tried, and we've succeeded, I should say, in creating some lessons that provide explicit instruction with an opportunity for students to apply this learning in a larger context. So going beyond the single word reading and applying it to informational texts, and Alex can say more about why we chose informational texts as our platform.

Alex Osburn:

Yeah, so thanks, Melissa. Morphology again is such an amazing tool for upper grade level teachers. I think that it brings together the idea of, you know, syntax and semantics and all these other pieces, and we decided that instead of teaching morphology in a siloed way where teachers were, you know, engaging in, maybe like the morpheme of the week, where the students learn the morpheme, they generate some additional words, they learn the meaning and then maybe it goes up on a bulletin board, we wanted to really integrate this idea and there's a lot of research right now kind of about this multi-competential approach. You know several different researchers. Stephanie Soler recently published about this integrated idea. Our work is really influenced by Mary Ann Wolfe, who publishes really extensively about the benefits really of teaching kind of across the five aspects of word knowledge, so phonology, orthography, semantics, syntax and morphology, and I know she was on a podcast with you girls talking all about that. So you know the idea of integration. So you know silos are out, Integration is in, Tell your friends.

Alex Osburn:

And we really wanted to integrate morphology not only by teaching all those word aspects but also connecting that to connected text and content area instruction, because the morphemes alone are not the magical ingredient, right, the true power lies, I think, in thinking about morphology as this link that Melissa just mentioned between linguistics and language comprehension.

Alex Osburn:

So you know, we want to make sure that students are able to take their knowledge of the morpheme and then expand their vocabulary and background knowledge to learn new content, to learn things that they're learning in school, ultimately using those morphemes as a tool to enhance their overall fluency and comprehension.

Alex Osburn:

So you know, in the classroom, what this might look like is that you are teaching your students about world wonders. So maybe you've identified the Coliseum as a landmark that you're going to be talking about and studying with your students, kind of in a context of a larger unit. And you've also identified that you want to talk about the root word tract, which means to drag or pull. So you maybe have a list of words that your students are going to work with so attractions, attracted, detract, extract, contractor and your students will learn and study those words and ultimately encounter them in a text about the Coliseum. And then they'll learn the word retractable, which means capable of being pulled back, in relation to this large canvas awning that the Colosseum originally had to be able to protect spectators from the sun and rain, which is really cool and the idea really is that what you're doing is students are densely populating their semantic neighborhoods and creating these strong connections between word study and world knowledge in this way.

Lori:

Yeah, oh, my gosh, okay. So I want to just just double click on the idea of connected text and just make sure that we are giving it a moment, because everyone listening might be wondering, like, what is connected text? And I'm going to take a stab at this. I feel like you're learning all of these morphemes and the connected text is actually seeing them live in text, where students are learning about a topic or a concept that they're naturally studying in class, right? So it's connected to social studies, connected to a science topic, but we're being very explicit about these morphemes or suffixes or whatever it might be that we're we're like really trying to hit home. Is that an accurate start to a connected text?

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, so connected, exactly. So I mean technically connected. Text means any group of words that are meaningly grouped together, so that could be like a phrase or a sentence. We're talking about it, as you said, lori, in like a larger passage and, as Alex said, you know how do we use it in a way where students are also taking what they now know about word parts. She was using tract and talking about how they're using their knowledge of tract to learn about these features of the Roman Colosseum. So how do you take this knowledge about morphemes and apply it to this content area passage where you're learning new things about a particular topic? So it's this like nice seamless kind of thread between learning you know these kind of word recognition skills and comprehension skills and then applying them in real time to a passage.

Lori:

Okay, that's so helpful. I just want to make sure everybody out there, we've leveled the playing field. We're all in the same definition of connected text and I just want to say, Alex, I love the way you said semantic neighborhoods. I just want to say, Alex, I love the way you said semantic neighborhoods. That is such a great way to explain it and I really appreciate and I think our listeners will too the examples that we gave to make this really concrete. I can see how that is just so helpful in in the integration piece, so moving from silos to integration. Thank you for those, those examples.

Alex Osburn:

Absolutely. Yeah, you know, I think teachers love examples. We want to know exactly. You're telling me something really amazing and I want to know how to do it, because teachers are such doers. I feel like everyone listening will be trying to do this tomorrow in their classroom, so we definitely want to be able to make this super tangible for folks.

Melissa:

For sure. So, speaking of doing it tomorrow in their classrooms, and well, yeah, this will come out when they're back in their classroom. So yes, when they're in their classrooms tomorrow and making it super tangible, we are actually going to walk through a routine that is all about this integrated morphology. It's explicit, and you all have some really concrete steps, and we have really exciting. We have examples from a teacher with students actually doing this work that we're going to listen to and talk all about. Before we get too deep into it, though, can you all just first give us a quick overview of all the steps in the routine, so that our listeners can jot them all down, and then we'll go back and dive into each part a little bit more.

Alex Osburn:

So what you're going to want to do is you're going to backward plan a lesson, and so we will talk a little bit later about what that looks like. But the steps will be that you're going to first want to build some background knowledge for your students. So step one, build background knowledge. Step two would be to learn explicitly, to teach explicitly the prefix, suffix or root that you've chosen for your students. You're going to then practice reading single words that have that prefix, suffix or root. You will read sentences with your students. I think we're on step four. Step five will be a vocabulary activity. Now, inherently, morphology is going to be vocabulary, but we're going to talk about using a frayer model. Step six you can do some spelling instruction. And then step seven you'll do some, you'll read the passage, you'll put it all together and what have you got? So those are the steps in our routine, but certainly can be modified by anyone to fit their instructional time or routines. But those are some of the suggested steps that we endorse.

Melissa:

All right. So before we even go back into those steps, let's talk about what a teacher would do to plan for this lesson before they even dive into the first step.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, so, as Alex mentioned, you know we backwards plan and we have found this to be like one of the single most effective ways in which to ensure that the lesson that you're teaching is preparing students to read a passage or to read connected texts, that we want to make sure that the sentences, the words, the vocabulary, the prefixes, suffixes, roots they're going to see those and so you're sort of previewing all of that with them in the lesson. You're giving them all of these opportunities to kind of drill or practice them before they have to integrate all of those skills as they're reading a passage, which is inherently a pretty complex challenge. So you choose a topic. So for this we chose the topic. This was part of a thematic series of lessons that we were doing, so our overarching theme was the rainforest, and so this particular lesson was about insects in the rainforest and we looked at some of the most common prefixes, suffixes and roots. As a teacher, if you're a classroom teacher you might be aligning this with some of your core curriculum resources for the morphemes that you're teaching in your units. You might be. If you're a reading specialist, you might be aligning it with some of your intervention resources. So we chose our prefix, and the prefix for this unit is going to be sub, which is also spelled as sup, s-u-b as in boy, and S-U-P as in power. And then we generated a passage about the insects of the rainforest and we wanted to include lots of words with sub and sup. And so, you know, we wrote these.

Melissa Orkin:

As a team, we develop a number of different curriculum resources. As an educator, you might already have a passage that you're choosing from, like you might be learning about, you know, the solar system or geography, and you might have those passages and you might just want to pop in a couple of words that have this prefix sub or sup. Or this is where you could use a tool like ChatGPT or some of the AI generation tools to do this. This is not casual, it's not easy. I mean, it's definitely easier with these tools, but it does take a little time. But I would say the time that you allocate towards creating an aligned lesson to the passage pays off tremendously in students ability to manage the text fluently and to understand what they're reading. And so we generate the passage and then from there we pull out some of the sentences, some of the single words, an appropriate vocabulary word, so that we're going to teach those steps prior to the student reading the passage.

Melissa:

Excellent. So we want to hear this right. We want to hear this in action. So we're going to actually hear a clip from a teacher who's introducing the prefix sub and sep to their students. Do you all want to say anything about that before we listen?

Alex Osburn:

The only other thing before you would jump right in is we did talk a little bit about doing some background building for your students, right? So students are probably coming to you with varying levels of knowledge about the rainforest, about insects. So you might do something like a KWL or you might have some sort of multimedia clip or you might read a short paragraph to your students, kind of orienting them to the topic and saying that we're going to be learning about this prefix, sub and sup, while also learning about, you know, insects on the rainforest floor. So you might read something like the floor of the rainforest is home to countless insects, like the colorful morpho butterfly and assassin bug, and just kind of build up a little bit of their background and key them into some of the key vocabulary that they'll be learning. And then, once you've done that, you're going to dive right in.

Alex Osburn:

Melissa, you're going to do exactly what you just said. You're going to introduce students to the more theme. You're going to do what Melissa my Melissa I love all the Melissa's have suggested in terms of kind of combining a morphological, problem-solving approach with some direct instruction, and so in the clip you'll hear that teacher kind of engaging in that work, where she's pulled some sentences directly from the text and she's talking about the meaning of the prefix, the different spellings of the prefix and again utilizing those sentences in this introductory process. So are we ready to hear it? Let's listen.

Teacher:

Prefix. That has two spellings. Okay, look over here. The letters for the first spelling are S-U-B and it's pronounced sub Excellent. Sub means under or from below. That's our meaning, okay, so watch me, and you're going to do the same. We're going to read this first sentence in our head and we're going to talk about the word that has the prefix. Are you ready? Everybody kind of read it in the head or you can whisper read Go ahead, Okay, great.

Students:

Let's read it out loud the brown side of their wings allows a morpho butterfly to submerge itself in leaves and hide from predators.

Teacher:

So the target word here that has our prefix is submerge, and submerge, you're thinking, means to go under. So the morpho butterfly goes under the leaves. Are you picturing that, okay?

Students:

And why?

Melissa Orkin:

would it go under.

Teacher:

To hide from predators To hide, that word to hide from predators. Do you know it? It's camouflage. Camouflage, that word to hide from predators, do you?

Lori:

know it, it's camouflage, camouflage, camouflage. You might have heard that.

Teacher:

Great. Okay so that's one spelling of our prefix. Let's read it Sub. There's another one. Watch this. It's a quick-a-rooski change Ready, Sup? Yes, it's sup. Say sup. So sup means the same thing as sub, but it has two different spellings to help with pronunciation. Okay. So sup or sub means under or from below.

Students:

Wait also Also.

Teacher:

Yeah, they mean the same thing, it's just two different spellings. It's like a bonus.

Students:

Because, like you can't do like sub-word.

Teacher:

Yeah, so now what I want you to do same thing. We'll read this in our head. Whisper read yeah, go you to do same thing. We will read this in our head, whisper read yeah, go ahead. Yeah, okay. And let's read it out loud each insect has unique traits that support the special habitat. So the word that has the prefix is support, so support meaning we like hold up, like keep it going yeah, to hold up kind of like carry it from below right.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, you know, I think what you hear, and that's our, our amazing colleague, sarah gannon. She is modeling this. Um, I think that you hear her deliver this instruction explicitly, in that she's both telling the students in a very clear way how to pronounce it, um, what the meaning, um, what the morphine means, but then she's also using other explicit instruction techniques. So you hear her modeling. You hear her engaging all of the students in choral reading. You hear her checking in for comprehension after each sentence, doing a little bit of visualization. She says what are you picturing? So you know, these activities really lend themselves to this great integration of all of these different aspects, of both word recognition and language comprehension.

Melissa:

That's what I was thinking. It's like, instead of just being a random sentence about submerging, right, you know they're they're learning about this topic, they're learning, you know, you can hear them learning about camouflage and what it. Oh, they're going to be submerged, right, like you hear that, along with the learning about the morphology. So it really, I mean, it just feels good to hear that, that they're learning some learning both of those things at the same time.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, and they also love being able to share what they already know about camouflage. But they already know, maybe, about butterflies and that sort of making all those connections.

Lori:

Yeah, yeah. Something that stands out to me is that it's very verbal. There's a lot of language happening for the students. They're saying the words there. You can hear them making sense of it, so I love listening to them trying to figure it out.

Melissa Orkin:

And so, teachers, as you're planning this lesson, something that we do also is we bold the word that has the prefix or suffix, so it's really easy for the students to recognize. We might preview those words with them beforehand as well, or any other language in this in the sentence, if we feel like it's going to be challenging for them.

Alex Osburn:

I also really love that she handled that like prefix assimilation kind of very easily. She simplified it for kids Sometimes it looks like sub, sometimes it looks like sup. You know, if her kids had questions she could have done something like let's try to say sub, port, right, like, oh, that feels like it's stuck in my throat, that doesn't work. So again, I think she did such a nice job of introducing that and the kids just got it, because I was thinking too there might be some words that have especially I was thinking of the S-U-P.

Melissa:

Like, the first thing I thought of was super and I was like, well, but super means above right, and we're saying sub and sup mean below. Do you also address it like? Sometimes you'll see, know these letters together, but they're not always going to be this morpheme. That means this yeah.

Alex Osburn:

so you know, I think sometimes we use language like it's an imposter or like a look-alike, like sometimes these words look like they have them and like amazing job, word detective, like you are like being curious and thoughtful and I love that you're looking for these chunks, but in this, this word, it just doesn't apply. But I do think that, yeah, it's something great to celebrate with kids when they are looking for those things, but also being able to say like nope, that one's trying to fool us, that's not quite right.

Melissa Orkin:

The RAVO program has a really fun way of describing it. So instead of calling them suffixes, they call them ender benders, because they come at the end of the word and they bend the meaning of the word. And then when they see something like mother or father or super, as you said, melissa, they call them pretender benders. So that's also a fun way of acknowledging that.

Alex Osburn:

And that's so tangible for kids, like they understand that. Like, oh, they're just pretending, yeah, yeah.

Melissa:

That's super helpful. All right, so let's here going into our next step. We're going into sentence reading. Do you all want to tell us what we're going to hear?

Alex Osburn:

Yeah, so keying up to sentence reading, you would read the words kind of in a single word format and that could be just a list of those words.

Alex Osburn:

You could also break them out into, maybe like a word matrix, where you break up the word submerge and then put it all together depending on the level of scaffolding you want to provide for your students. So you would read some words in single words format and then you would jump into sentence reading so you would apply those words that you read as single words into sentences and what we recommend really is kind of scooping those sentences into syntactic phrases, so the prepositional phrase and others, to make sure that you're supporting kind of fluency and comprehension at the same time. So when we hear the clip you'll hear the teacher kind of supporting students as they corally read kind of in these scooped phrases, and then you'll hear her ask some really great questions that are going to be supported, that kind of that sentence level comprehension, and they'll be able to kind of refer back to those scoops for some of the answers all right, let's hear it look up, here we are on.

Teacher:

We just finished our single word reading. Let's check that. And we are on, to everyone's favorite. Look up here sentence reading. All right, can't wait. All right, you guys know how to do this, but I'm gonna remind you when we read our sentences. You're going to see these scoops and I'm gonna hold my pen here and that's your chance to read that first scoop in your head and then, when I move my scoop, we're gonna read it all together and then we'll repeat that so everybody gets a chance to read it in their heads first.

Teacher:

That's really important.

Students:

Okay, go ahead the butterfly shimmering wings subtract from the darkness of the forest floor.

Teacher:

now let's put it all together.

Students:

We can read it Ready the butterfly's shimmering wings subtract from the darkness of the forest floor.

Teacher:

So this sentence is about the what.

Students:

The butterfly's shimmering wings.

Teacher:

So the shimmering wings of the butterfly.

Students:

So you're picturing those wings the morpho butterfly.

Teacher:

I love that, thank you. And what are the shimmering wings of the butterfly do?

Students:

subtract so it like light up the fourth floor. So it yeah subtract.

Teacher:

How do you think of subtract? Normally, subtract means to remove, so if you have a number six and you subtract two, you take away so subtracting to take so it takes, remove so the shimmering wings, take away, or they light.

Students:

You're thinking it lightens up the what the forest floor it's like lighting the path.

Teacher:

Because the forest floor is what what's the word it's dark, the darkness of the forest floor. So the morpho butterfly does what.

Students:

The wings. It lights up the forest.

Teacher:

Yes, so are you thinking about the two sides of the butterfly's wings? Because here we learned about the what the dark side and now we've got a lighter side.

Students:

I think the light side may be on the bottom, because if it were on the top it would really light up that well. Or maybe one side is for like, one side's, for like seeing and kind of being.

Teacher:

Maybe attraction and one side is for camouflage Camouflaging. I love it.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, so I think you heard here, as Alex said, you know, first we broke up the. These are longer sentences, right? These are compound sentences in many cases and so we want to give kids some guidance as to when to breathe through these sentences and how to even kind of break up the sentences into its meaningful groups or phrases. So we call that syntactic phrasing. So the butterfly shimmering wings, so that's kind of the noun phrase or what we would think of as the subject, who or what the sentence is about. Subtract, so that's the verb phrase or the predicate From the darkness, that's the first prep, or the predicate from the darkness, that's the first prepositional phrase of the forest floor, that's the second prepositional phrase. So I think the phrasing is great because it helps with pacing when students are reading and prosody, but it also really supports comprehension because it allows them to, within a sentence, break up who or what the sentence is about, what are they doing, where, when, how is it happening?

Melissa Orkin:

Sometimes those prepositional phrases come at the beginning of the sentence, Sometimes they come in the middle, Sometimes they come at the end, and so guiding students visually with the scoops is really helpful. And also, as you heard, they corally read, read again to maximize engagement. You know this is straight out of Anita Archer's handbook on explicit instruction strategies and that allowed them to. We had them first read it silently, then corally read and then read it again so that they had it smooth, so they weren't cold reading it aloud. For the first time they had some practice. Yeah.

Melissa:

That's what I was going to say. I loved hearing it. It's hard because we can't see the scoops, we can't see that visually, but you could hear it right. When you heard it the first time, you could really hear them in those phrases. And then the second time, you know, it was like, oh, I'm just reading it more naturally, but they've had that chance to think about it in those phrases and I love that you're bringing it. You know that helps, yes, with fluency, but it also helps with comprehension as well.

Melissa Orkin:

And we can, we will make this lesson available in your show notes too. So if educators are interested in kind of seeing what this all looks like in print, we're happy to share that Excellent.

Melissa:

I'm sure they will All right. So the next one is the vocabulary activity that you mentioned, alex, and that's with the Freyer model. We broke that up into a few different clips that we're going to listen to so they can hear the different steps even of that. But set us up for it, alex, because I know a lot of people are familiar with Freyer models, but this might be a little bit different.

Alex Osburn:

Yeah. So this is not that I should pick favorites, but this is my favorite part of the routine. I love the Freyer model. It's really designed to expand students' knowledge and associations with some of these key tier two vocabulary terms that feature the target morpheme. And so we all know that tier two vocabulary from Beck and her colleagues are really characterized as words that you know appear frequently in written language, maybe less frequently in spoken language, and really have high utility across multiple content areas. And so in terms of the routine, we recommend pulling a tier two vocabulary word from the passage, something that has that target morpheme, ideally so that again they're seeing that morpheme again, and using a frayer model with your students. So I think probably a lot of our listeners are familiar with the frayer model, kind of that quadrant with the word in the center and you're doing a sentence, a definition, examples, non-examples, et cetera. And we find that the Freer model is a super powerful tool when it's used not as an independent activity but really as a teaching tool, where you have pre-populated each of these quadrants and you're revealing each of them, which I think we'll get a chance to listen to, which is really amazing, and through a collaborative discussion you're talking to students about the definition, you're talking to students about the sentence, and that sentence is a sentence that they didn't generate on their own, which may or may not represent their understanding of the word, but it's a sentence that you've written that shows really the meaning of the word. Then there's a really cool activity with examples, non-examples, which I think can be really hard.

Alex Osburn:

When I was doing fair models in my own classroom, students would come up with crazy things like well, the word is treaty. So you know, a non-example is a potato and yes, I mean that is right, they are right, but you know it doesn't really tell me if they understand what a treaty is or not. So this kind of offering them scenarios and they do kind of a thumbs up, thumbs down, like is that an example of this word, is it not? And then wrapping up the conversation with a series of questions that again are building out that semantic neighborhood, those rich associations, neighborhood, those rich associations. And really the reason why we want students to have this really deep knowledge is so that when they see the word, all of those meanings, all of those connections are firing, they're fluently calling it up and their comprehension is also triggered. So I would love to hear the clips. I know you've broken it out and maybe we could just kind of talk about each of them after we hear.

Melissa:

Absolutely, and I'll just say I had very similar experiences with Freyer models. You weren't alone, thank you, and the word that they are going to do is substitute, substitute, yes, okay, yeah, all right, here's the first one.

Teacher:

So today we are going to talk more about our prefix, sub and sup, right, and we're going gonna do our vocabulary routine and then we will go on to our starting of our story reading so we can get to the assassin and the morpho butterfly. All right, you ready? All right. So, as I told you, we're gonna talk more about this word today, in particular, it's substitute. Say it with me so substitute.

Teacher:

Give me a thumbs up if you know the prefix. Do you know it? What is it? So you got it. So I'm gonna read a sentence with sub and then we'll talk about the meaning. My grandmother decided to substitute applesauce for oil when making the chocolate cake for my birthday. So what did she do? She substituted.

Students:

It's like you substitute honey for maple syrup. Yeah so you are you thinking about?

Teacher:

it, you switch it, you switch it. All right, let's see what the definition is. It's in this case we're using it as a verb when something takes the place or performs the function of another thing. Does that make sense how we used our sentence? So we're substituting, we're switching it out, as you guys said.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, so she's providing the context first, so she's introducing it with a sentence which is not always the sequence that we use when we're talking about vocabulary, but I think you could see it automatically activates in one of the students' minds this experience that she had of switching out honey. For what did she say? Maple syrup. Yeah, yeah, so she's, she's connecting that with her existing knowledge. And then, um, sarah, the edu, the teacher provides, like the you know, technical definition and, um, obviously, listeners, you can't see this, but there is an image of um, uh, uh, woman baking with woman baking with a child, so that they can kind of also have the illustration or the visual support. So now they're going to go into the part of the routine where they are determining which of the sort of scenarios that Sarah describes are examples of substitute and which are not examples of substitute.

Teacher:

All right, next up, we're going to think about some associations. We're going to be thinking about more about the word substitute. So for this, you're going to use your thumbs, like we usually do. So I'm going to read something and if you agree that one of the examples I'm reading is an example of substitute, you're going to give me a thumbs up. What if it's not? If it's not, yeah, you're going to do a what Thumbs down. All right, are you ready? Okay, which of the following are examples of substitute?

Students:

Ready, wait it has to say substitute.

Teacher:

So you'll see?

Students:

No, it's like substitute without saying substitute.

Teacher:

So if to say substitute, so you'll see it's like substitute without saying so. If it means the same thing as substitute, yeah, all right, are you ready? When coach sends in a new player, giving the original player a chance to rest, does that mean substitute? Does it something takes the place of? Yeah, it's kind of like substituting.

Students:

Hold on on, let her finish then you can do it. Like you know, like subs, A sub, Like in soccer or like whatever, yeah, Sport. Like you would be like oh blank, and then you high-five them.

Teacher:

Do you suppose that sub is a shortened form of the word Substitute Maybe? What were?

Students:

you going to say Like substituting is like it's not taking its place permanently, it's just doing it for like a few.

Lori:

Could be just for like a temporary.

Teacher:

Okay, here's another example when you switch one ingredient for another Is that an example, because that's the same thing as the grandmother's like oil. All right, are you ready when the school play is canceled because there was no understudy for the lead role?

Students:

Does it even have anything to do with having an understudy would be a substitute. Now.

Teacher:

Right, but if there's no understudy, they had to cancel it.

Students:

Which cancel, wasn't something.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, so this is where they're getting to engage in process with the examples and, as Alex said before, you know, having these pre-planned by the teacher really allows for kind of the appropriate associations to develop rather than it being a little bit too free form for the students to generate.

Alex Osburn:

Right, and I think I mean I think it's so hard to think of things on the fly, right, Like when you're trying to teach academic language and you're trying to think of examples or non-examples. It can be really really hard, so kind of thinking those things through. I also love that, like the moment where they realize like subs in you know, soccer is like for short for substitute, like amazing, like I just feel like, and then, connecting to the idea of the understudy, I just feel like you can see the connections forming and the wheels turning as they make associations to real life scenarios that these kiddos have certainly encountered.

Lori:

Yeah, one thing I'm thinking about too is like the way that the Freyer model is used here is just so effective.

Lori:

Because when students are trying, are just learning, this like this is still new to them.

Lori:

We're asking them to do the most difficult cognitive process in a typical Freyer model, where they then fully, deeply understand the meaning of the word and then have to export it from their body, usually in verbal or written form, and that is difficult to do, I would, I would dare say, even as an adult.

Lori:

To come up with these three things takes some time and thought, right, and I mean, obviously we're being intentional because we're teachers and we're choosing selective scenarios, but I think when I see this in action, it makes me really want to shift my own practice too to do it in this way, because it's honestly, it's faster, because it's honestly, it's faster, it's more efficient and it's more effective because students are not having to do something that with their knowledge that they just learned. We know that's not, that's not how like learning works. You don't, you're not really super good at something when you just learn it, right? So, um, I like how this is really like I'm thinking of it and I don't know if this is how you're thinking of it. I'm thinking of it as a really intentional scaffold for making those um, or strengthening those semantic networks or neighborhoods, as you said, alex.

Melissa:

Yeah, yeah, and I was going to say, laurie too, even the non-example here, you know, it's like yours, alex, it's not potato, right, it's not something completely unrelated, but it gave them something, even with understudy in there. You heard him say like, yeah, but an understudy would be like a substitute, so he still was able to, like you know, make even more meaning from the non-example. So it wasn't just something random, so it really was intentional, those examples.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, analysis, as Lori said, is always going to be easier than generation, and so when you're thinking about, you know what is an initial stage of learning. It's going to be analyzing scenarios to determine whether or not they fit, and then, if you're wanting students to go further, could they generate their own scenario, right? So so I appreciate you pointing that out.

Lori:

I appreciate how you made it sound very nice what I said analysis versus generation. I was like exported from their bodies their bodies.

Alex Osburn:

So the last clip will be the opportunity for the teacher to scaffold a further discussion, kind of responding to some questions, where students would be again applying their knowledge of the word substitute Great.

Teacher:

So I want you to think. What are some reasons you may need a substitute when playing sports. So think for a minute. Why might you need a substitute when playing a sport? You can talk to Mayfiel. What are you thinking?

Students:

So if, like, the lead player is hurt or tired or something, they're going to have to switch out for another player yeah, cause like they can't really play, do I say it? Sure, do you have a? Um? Yeah, it's like they get tired too, but like yeah, I agree. So you guys, somebody might get hurt. Miles said and we have said somebody hurt or tired.

Teacher:

You need a substitute.

Melissa:

I love it Alright.

Teacher:

so now we're gonna switch, so bees will go first, so you'll you'll speak first, and then you'll switch, and and Miles will then speak. How is a substitute different than someone who holds a position permanently?

Students:

Well, because, like the person, Wait, can you read that again? Sure.

Teacher:

How is a substitute different than someone who holds a position permanently Like?

Students:

doesn't permanently. That means like like you're there, like you're not gonna move, you're not. Yeah, like I'm like, let's say like I'm permanently on this team, like I'm not going anywhere until like.

Teacher:

Yeah, so you're thinking about teams, but have you ever heard of a substitute in another way, like a substitute at your school, a substitute teacher? Teacher have you had a substitute teacher before. Yeah, so what's the difference between a substitute teacher, for example, and a teacher who's there all the time, the permanent teacher?

Students:

The permanent teacher is like you're a whole year teacher and then like if she's out sick then you would have like a substitute, let's say like for like two days or like yeah, Not like temporary a fill in.

Teacher:

Do you have an example of?

Alex Osburn:

something that was substitutes different.

Teacher:

You agree? Yeah, so the substitute teacher would be there only temporarily, right?

Alex Osburn:

And wouldn't be there the whole time. Ok, amazing, yeah, so again, it's just another opportunity to you know the examples, non-examples, give them some kind of concrete. And then again, the opportunity with those associations and these questions is you know, what do you know about this word? How can you connect with your own experience? And even if you don't have some of those lived experiences, how can you learn from others in your group?

Melissa Orkin:

Oh, I was just going to say, you know, I think it is a little bit. It's a little bit of a switch in terms of thinking about vocabulary instruction. Like we often think of vocabulary instruction as here let me define this new term for you Let me, you know, make sure that you, you know, now build this into your lexicon and start, and I'll give you opportunities to practice it, either writing sentences, but here what we're doing is we're saying you probably have had some type of experience with this word, even if you didn't know the actual word, like you've had some similar experience, for example, having a substitute teacher or, you know, playing a sports game and being asked to switch out with someone. So, you know, asking students to take what they already know, you know, and assimilate in this new information is just thought of as like a really effective practice for being able to integrate new terminology into their kind of language usage, whether it's just speaking or also writing.

Melissa:

Before we get into our last step, I have a quick logistical question. So those three clips were all part of the vocabulary activity, so I'm assuming they would all happen on the same. It was five minutes total. We listened to it separately but I mean it took five minutes. But would that happen the same day as the first few steps, or is this separated over a week, or does it? Does it matter?

Alex Osburn:

Yes, so when we talk to teachers we separate it out depending on you know the amount of routines they're doing into a two or three day routine that will last, you know, between 15 and 20 minutes, or you know a 45 minute kind of lesson kind of all together. So typically in day one you might do something like introduce the affix, you know just single word reading and sentence reading. Then day two you might come back to do the vocabulary routine, a little dictation and then the passage reading. So that's how you might consider breaking it up. You know, depending on your schedule and time constraints.

Melissa:

That makes perfect sense, all right? Well, let's hear this last part. Right? So we are headed into the passage reading, but there is a step before the passage reading.

Alex Osburn:

Yeah, there's a quick step before. We won't spend a lot of time chatting about it, but we do recommend doing some sort of a dictation, right? So we want these students not only to be able to recognize these words in text, but we also want them to be able to use them in their own writing. So we recommend pulling, you know, words that you've been working on and maybe even some of the sentences, to do a little bit of a dictation routine, and then you know. One of the only things to really note about that is, you know, when you're talking about suffixes in particular, you're going to want to think about some of those high utility spelling rules that might come into play, right, like the doubling rule or the drop E or the change Y. So that is an opportunity again to reinforce some of those pieces. But we definitely want students to practice writing some of those things so that again, they're going to be able to use them in their own writing.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, and we know that. You know, if students are struggling with spelling some of these longer, more robust words, they probably will avoid them in their writing. And so giving them, you know, an explicit opportunity to practice some of these spelling strategies, you know, when do you change Y to an I? You know, for example, we tell them, you know well, first you have to look at the base word and determine is there a consonant that comes before the Y in the base word? And then does the suffix begin with a letter besides I? So we give them like a couple of questions that they'll use as they're considering how to adjust spelling. So, for example, baby if you want to add ES to baby, you would.

Melissa Orkin:

So, melissa, is there a consonant that comes before the Y in baby? Yes, yes, and does the suffix begin with a letter other than I? So we're adding ES, no, okay. So then what we want to do is we want to change the Y to an I. So if your answer to both questions is yes, you change a Y to I. But then, for example, if we're doing Melissa, the word enjoy and we add the suffix ing to make it enjoying, is there a consonant that comes before the letter Y, no, no, and so we would not change a Y to an I when we're adding enjoying. So giving kids just a couple of quick kind of strategies or reminders for these spelling rules and lots and lots of opportunity to practice is really helpful not only at ensuring more accurate spelling but ensuring greater usage of robust vocabulary in their overall writing.

Melissa:

All right, so we have our passage reading the last step.

Alex Osburn:

Yeah, it's like put it all together and what have you got? So students are now kind of ready to read the passage. So I think we'll share a little bit of a clip where you have a teacher who's working with her students through this process and you'll notice that she's setting the purpose for reading and connecting that back to the questions by previewing the questions that they'll answer and supporting students as they corally read the text.

Melissa Orkin:

So the last activity is going to be reading our story. So it should look just like this the Secret Life of Rainforest Insects. So what do you think this story is going to be about? Rainforest?

Students:

insects. So what do you think this story is going to be about? In the rainforest, and what insects have we learned about? So far in this lesson the assassin bug and the something Morpho, morpho. I don't remember that word.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, so we're gonna read a whole passage or a whole story about them now, and as we read, I want you to be thinking about a couple of questions in your mind. Okay, so let me turn this over so you can see it. The first question is can we compare and contrast how the morpho butterfly and the assassin bug use their proboscis? What is similar and different about how they feed? Oh, so I think they might both have a proboscis and then is it proboscis?

Students:

was that what we talked about in the beginning?

Melissa Orkin:

yes, they might both have a proboscis Miles. Miles corrected me and we're gonna have to think about how they use it to feed. Okay, Go ahead and let's read the next sentence silently to ourselves. Okay, Miles, why don't you read these sentences aloud to Maeve? This'll be your turn to read aloud, so put your finger underneath the word each and go ahead and read that, and Maeve will follow along.

Students:

Each insect has unique traits that support this special habitat. The morpho butterfly is known for its two-sided wings brown on the bottom and bright blue on the top.

Melissa Orkin:

Okay, so we already knew this right from some of the sentences we had read. Okay, so let's read the next sentences silently, and then maybe you'll read them aloud to Miles.

Students:

Its blue color is not from pigment, but from tiny wings, wing structure that reflect reflect light, creating a magical effect. The brown side of their wings allow the morpho butterfly to submerge itself in leaves and hide from predators.

Melissa Orkin:

And what was the word that we noticed? That has our submerge, which means like to go under. Yeah, all right. Should we read this last part of this passage or part of this paragraph together, silently? Okay, let's do it Under two. Was it from To Survive? Yes, all right, let's do it To survive the butterfly relies on the forest floor for a supply of nutrients.

Students:

It uses its long proboscis or feeding tube to drink the juice of fermenting fruit. After feeding, the morpho takes flight. The butterfly's shimmering wings subtract from the darkness of the forest. I keep going floor forest, so do you have?

Melissa Orkin:

an idea about one of our Four Four. Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four.

Students:

Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four Four.

Melissa Orkin:

Four, four, four, four, four, four, four, four, four, four, four with Maeve.

Students:

Yeah, they like stick it in a fermenting fruit and stuff Whatever's in the fermenting fruit.

Melissa Orkin:

Now, it juices, it's like wine.

Students:

And then it says after feeding, the morpho takes flight. It's like just after they die, it just goes.

Melissa Orkin:

And Maeve. What were? There were two words here, maeve, that had our um prefix of the day. What were they?

Students:

Supply yeah.

Melissa Orkin:

And subtract, subtract, and do you remember what subtract, means?

Students:

To take away yeah to take away.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, exactly, great, all right, so that was me, our substitute teacher.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, and you heard me be corrected by my student as to the pronunciation of proboscis, which I will never forget again. Yeah, so you know, I think that this is a challenging text. This is not a decodable text. I mean there are lots of opportunities for students to read words with sub and sup, but it's not a controlled text. It's at like a Lexile level of like 740, 800, which is around, you know, kind of a fourth grade range. And so you heard that there are lots of complex sentences, there's lots of language with prefixes and suffixes, and we want to ensure that we are providing opportunities for students, especially with this kind of support, to apply their knowledge of these morphemes, to both increase sort of their word recognition, to build their fluency skills and to develop their comprehension, both at the vocabulary level, the sentence level and then overall.

Melissa Orkin:

At this passage level, we didn't get to hear how the assassin bug uses its proboscis, but you heard that they're going to be comparing and contrasting those two things. So they're going to be learning about one way an insect uses a proboscis. They're going to be learning about a second way, and we did preview the word proboscis with them when we built background knowledge at the very beginning of the lesson. We didn't have audio of that, but so that they are familiar with this term it's just me that's not familiar with it and so we we really wanted to stretch them in terms of being able to use these skills and generalize them to a challenging text.

Alex Osburn:

Yeah, you know, and I love all of that that you just said, melissa, I also feel like you could hear in their voices like the excitement. They sounded fluent and I feel like, even though it was kind of a complex text, they were persevering right. They were using the skills that we had kind of built up and scaffolded for them to be able to tackle this challenging text and they sounded really, really excited to be, you know, reading that and learning about these crazy bugs.

Lori:

This was such an experience doing this. Thank you so much for walking us through. I feel like I learned so much and I mean to be perfectly honest, I love a routine, I love a clear routine, so this is awesome. There's something that I do want to talk about that you know lots of teachers might be familiar with the idea of syllable division rules, but you know, we we kind of talked a smidge about that the idea that syllabication alone can be a little bit tricky and using this morphophonemic approach, one that looks at both sound and meaning, can be more effective than syllabication only, especially for grades three through six. Can you all elaborate on that a little bit? Sure, so you know.

Melissa Orkin:

I'm not a linguist, so I hope I represent this information correctly. But you know, what we know about language systems is that they use different ways of representing ideas in language. So there are some languages in the world that rely just on what we call an alphabetic system. So, lori, you said a morphophonemic, so that's the phonemic part. You know that there is a sound and it's represented by a letter, so these would be languages like Spanish and Italian, and so they rely on essentially phonics in order to build words. And then, you know, words carry meaning. Other languages, for example, like Russian and French, tend to rely more on like a phonemic, a morphological system rather, where it's more like larger. I think maybe French actually is more phonemic, but Russian morphology is like this idea of just units of meaning, basically. And then there are other languages that use syllables. There are other languages that use like logographic, for example like Mandarin, where it's symbols that represent, you know, ideas.

Melissa Orkin:

What English is doing is it's combining both morphemes, which are the smallest unit of meaning in language, and phonemes, which are the smallest unit of sound. And so what happens is sometimes we'll have words that have a familiar group of letters, but they're pronounced differently because we're trying to preserve meaning because we're trying to preserve meaning. So, for example, the suffix ed, which is a morpheme, means to, you know, put a word in the past tense. When we say the suffix ed with the word jump, we pronounce it jumped right, and did you hear that kind of t at the end of the word Versus. When we pronounce it with the word beg, we say begged and you hear a d at the end of the word, versus. When we pronounce it with the word beg, we say begged and you hear a D at the end of the word versus.

Melissa Orkin:

When we combine it with the base word want, we say wanted. So we're adjusting sometimes the pronunciation because we're preserving the spelling based on the meaning. The pronunciation is adjusting because of the co-articulation piece. The same is true for a root word like sign, signal. Signature. Like sign means a symbol, basically, and a signal is a gesture, a symbol or a gesture, and a signature is like a symbol of identity. So it means the same thing in each of those different words but it's being pronounced differently because of some shifts in our pronunciation that occur.

Lori:

Alex, did you want to add anything onto that?

Alex Osburn:

No, I mean I think you know William Van Cleave, I think, did a presentation where he talked a little bit about, you know, when we teach morphemes, again, it can help us with things like spelling, and so Melissa just talked about some of those differences. But, like you know, when you have a word inspire and inspiration you know inspiration you're trying to guess as you're spelling it like is the er. You know I-R-O-R-U-R or E-R, but if you know inspire, then you're going to know it's the I. So I think that again, kind of integrating the idea of syllable types with this idea of morphemes is going to be really powerful and having students be able to be flexible, I think, in their thinking and uncover some of those meanings more easily.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, and interestingly, I mean, one of the early kind of linguists to write about this was Noam Chomsky's wife, carol Chomsky, who in herself was a very well-respected linguist, and she called this phenomenon lexical spelling, whereas Alex said and I said we're preserving the meaning or the lex, the meaning of the word, that's the lex part with the spelling, but the pronunciation might shift.

Lori:

Yeah, for me here, just hearing you all talk about it, just hearing you all talk about it, one thing that's standing out, and that also stood out in the routine again, was just the robust oral language opportunities are really helpful for students to quote get this right, to have the opportunity to hear it be said, to say it, to use it, to repeat it over and over again and then to think about other ways this, you know, for example, this root could be used.

Lori:

Melissa, you gave the example of signal, signature, signify, right. I mean, I'm thinking there might not even say that I can't think of any words right now where it's saying sign, sign. I was like there's another one where it's not saying that sig, right. So that is so important and again, that that verbal piece of like we're orally making sense of this together and having those opportunities to read and then to write. Like you said, dictation was a part of it. So it's a really like robust and very full circle opportunity to make sense of this in a way that's more than just syllabication. You're really exploring, you know, like you said, that sound and the meaning.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, you know, I would encourage educators, even if you've, you know, dabbled in morphology before or you've used some routines, like Alex was. You know, we've all been very vulnerable in trying something out like a Frere model or trying to kind of like teach, you know, a prefix or a suffix in isolation, and it doesn't go as well as we want and sometimes we just kind of abandon that because we feel overwhelmed by the prospect of trying to unpack what went wrong while maintaining all of our other responsibilities. But I do think that the key here is, as Alex said, is breaking down silos and trying to offer an opportunity for students to build their different aspects of word knowledge with the morpheme. So how do they think of it in a vocabulary word? How do they think of it when they're spelling? How do they think of it in a passage or even just sentences, like even just starting with sentences? If a passage feels too daunting, that can just be really helpful for your students.

Melissa:

And you all said something about, is it? 60% of unfamiliar words, especially for students in grades three and above, can be broken down into these morphemes. Did I get that?

Melissa Orkin:

right, oh yeah, so you can't do much with a word. Without a morph, with just a base word, you can't get very far in terms of our language. Our language would be very, very simplistic. It would be like dog sit, it would be very, very simple. So we need those morphemes. I mean, morphemes are really giving us sort of that robust nature of our language. They're adding description, they're adding different states of being, they're supporting our syntax and so most of the words you know, as text complexity increases for students and it happens fast.

Melissa Orkin:

You know students go from reading fairly simple sentences with kind of predictable vocabulary to reading, you know, longer texts and novels, and then to be using reading as their primary tool for learning. You know we read words in 150 milliseconds. We cannot compete with delivering information in an oral way. So we're handing children worksheets, we're handing them textbooks or maybe not anymore, but we're handing them reading material and we're asking them to use this material to learn about the solar system, to learn about ecology. So they're going to be encountering all of this robust language and they need both the automaticity to get through that text so that's the fluency part but also the strategies to understand these longer and kind of novel words that they're encountering.

Melissa Orkin:

So it is a really great alignment with this stage of upper elementary school. And they also you know, I find, and maybe Alex can speak to this too you know they've learned the code of phonics but the code of morphology and the idea of unpacking that you know morphemes like roots, like tract and scribe, and port and sub and sup and able, they have meaning and that they can kind of be metalinguistic about those meanings and generalize it. They're like it's a really cool way for them to think about language is having this additional code that they can use and apply to all of these different texts. And they love to find, as you said, melissa, words that break the code and words that follow the code. And that's fantastic, like that means that they're paying attention and that they're acting as little linguists when they're interacting with past text.

Lori:

Yeah, Okay, so you've given us so much to think about today, so many practical application ideas and also lots of knowledge about morphology and how important it is. Oh my gosh, I cannot wait for teachers to hear this and to grab all kinds of amazing ideas. I'd love for you to just kind of finish this out with just maybe like one thing for teachers to think about as they close out this podcast episode.

Melissa Orkin:

Oh my gosh.

Lori:

One thing Just try the routine. That would be my take.

Alex Osburn:

That would be mine, Well, I'll say that mine is that all roads should lead to connected text, right Like backward plan from a connected text. See what you have that already has some of these morphemes in it. Build up a routine, use some of the routines we've talked about today to get yourself and your students into that connected text, to apply those discrete skills in that connected text and content areas and I think that you'll see engagement, motivation and skills increasing exponentially.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, I agree, and I think don't underestimate the amount of practice I think too that students need in applying these skills and the. You know the additional opportunities that you can give them, like the cycling back and things to um, to afford them chances to really um, use this knowledge. I think you know your conversation about tech sets and like you can do that you know as well with these um, um, prefixes, suffixes and roots, kind of bringing them back over and over again as you're studying a particular theme or unit, whether it's the rainforest or the solar system or what have you.

Lori:

Yeah Well, thank you so much for this conversation. We really appreciate you both coming on and talking all about it, all about morphology, so thank you for being here.

Alex Osburn:

Thanks for having us.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, thank you, enjoy teachers.

Melissa:

Enjoy. Teachers leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.

Lori:

We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.