Making Big Words

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Our text, Best Practices in Literacy Instruction, suggests using Making Big Words and Word Detectives lessons to help third, fourth and fifth graders develop morphemic awareness.
In Making Big Words, students learn the morphemic patterns that they can use to decode, spell and build meaning for big words (Cunningham, 2015). Making Big Words has three steps. In the first step, students are given clues to make and spell words using the letters from a strip of letters they are given. In the second step, students sort out related words and construct sentences to show how the words are related. Finally in the third and most important step, students transfer their knowledge and are orally given new words. Students then decide which word parts these new words share with the related words and how that will help them …show more content…

Students are taught to ask two questions when they see new words: “Do I know any other words that look and sound like this word?” and “Are any of these look-alike/sound-alike words related to one another?” (Cunningham, 2015, p.191). The answer to the first question helps students pronounce and spell the word, while the answer to the second question helps them discover what meaning relationships exist between this new word and the other words they already know. Because the words always come out of the context of what is being studied, students learn to use morphology and context together as clues to solve the mysteries of the big words. Students need to be word detectives and apply this strategy in all content areas throughout the school day. Students encounter many new words throughout the day and because English is a morphologically related language, most new words can be connected to other words by their spelling and pronunciation, and many new words are related in meanings to words that students already

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