Our Wildwood, Winter 2019, Volume 44

FEATURE Structured Word Inquiry and the Science of Literacy

ENGAGING EMERGING READERS Tahnee Muñoz, Dolphin Pod head teacher, begins a literacy lesson with students seated on the classroom’s colorful carpet. “I’m going to reread an interesting sentence we heard in Charlotte’s Web yesterday,” she begins. “‘Children almost always hang on to things tighter than their parents think they will.’” She’s written the sentence on the whiteboard and reads it again, and the students’ eyes follow her finger as she points out the words. In the K-1 Pods, Structured Word Inquiry introduces our youngest readers to some core premises of English literacy. Chief among them, that all words consist of one or more of three essential building blocks: prefixes, bases, and suffixes. “Let’s go on a hunt!” Tahnee exclaims. “Let’s find words in this sentence that have bases and suffixes in them.” She checks that her students understand these terms that they learned previously. Tahnee just launched these Pod students into a structured word inquiry—whetting their curiosity with her word-hunting challenge. Students start raising their hands. “I see ‘children,’” one student says. “I see ‘parents,’” another says. For the latter, Tahnee engages students to tease out the base—“parent”—and the suffix—the “s” that makes it plural.

Tahnee then pushes her kids a bit further: “Who sees any digraphs or trigraphs in this sentence? Do you remember what these are?” Many students raise their hands, and some of them proudly provide answers. For the uninitiated—digraphs represent a single sound represented with two letters (like the “ng” in sing), and trigraphs use three letters (like the “tch” in match). The students find multiple examples of digraphs—the “ch” in children and the “th” in things for starters. The trigraphs, however, are a bit harder to find. More on that later. Wildwood’s adoption of SWI is inspired by the seminal work of reading specialist, linguist, and teacher Pete Bowers, Ph.D. Several Wildwood elementary teachers first learned about Bowers and SWI while attending a conference a few years ago at The Nueva School, a K-12 school in the Bay Area. The implementation of SWI at Wildwood was solidified when Emily Johnson became Wildwood’s director of middle school in 2017—after a long-term appointment as a director at Nueva. When she arrived, Emily leveraged her long-standing connection to Bowers and his work to bring SWI to Los Angeles. LEARNING FROM THE SOURCE TO SOLVE THE “EQUATION”

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