play with your words, not with your food.

hmmm... makes sense, that when children don't understand the words in a text, they don't comprehend the text as a whole. I can read my sister's Pathology textbook all day long and the fact of the matter is, I comprehend nothing.  That's because I don't know what 80% of the words mean! (Let's be honest, I don't even know how to pronounce them).

Word study is crucial because their oral vocabulary is much bigger than their written repertoire, and they need to know what words look like and associate the meaning with that spelling. Children know lots of words, but they don't know how to spell them.

What to do?

• making words games
• studying Latin and Greek word roots
• grouping based on spelling patterns
• grouping based on rhyming patterns

play with the words!  Word study can be like playing with Legos; letters can be combined in countless ways to make all sorts of things! 

"Making Words is a powerful activity because within one instructional format there are endless possibilities for discovering how our alphabetic system works.  It is a quick, every-pupil-response, manipulative activity with which children get actively involved."  -Cunningham & Cunningham

How will you seize the opportunity to make word study fun and build students' vocabulary?