Foundational Skills

Using Spark to Reinforce Morphology Instruction

By Karen Filewych (educator, author, and literacy consultant)

Have you recently taught a lesson in morphology? Capitalize on the books in Spark to reinforce this teaching. How?

Begin by scanning the books for recently taught morphemes.
Choose a book that uses the morpheme(s), preferably more than once.
Before engaging in shared reading with this book, review the morpheme(s) you have chosen with students. Be sure to review both spelling and meaning.
Show students the cover of the book you have chosen. Discuss the title and the images as appropriate. Then, ask them to predict words with the morpheme(s) that might be used in this book. Make a list of the words students suggest. (Note: This process is more important than the accuracy of their answers. Students will be thinking about both the structure and meaning of the morphemes through the words brainstormed.)
During shared reading of the text, students will be looking intently for words with the morpheme(s). When students notice them during the reading, refer back to your list. Circle the words if student predictions were correct or add them to the list if necessary.
Continue reading, discussing the content along the way!

Other Ideas:

Weekly Word Finds – Establish a section of a whiteboard as Weekly Word Finds. Challenge students to look for words with morphemes they have learned during independent reading in Spark and add them to Weekly Word Finds. At the end of the week, discuss the words found and invite students to add them to the appropriate pages of their Word Study notebooks.

Word Wonderings – You might also ask students to watch for morphemes not yet taught. Words with unknown morphemes can be added to a Word Wonderings bulletin board, leading to future word investigations.

Weekly Word Finds, Word Study notebooks and Word Wonderings are all tools used in the new Pearson product: Bug Club Morphology.

Using Spark’s Bug Club Decodable Books for Shared Reading

By Karen Filewych (educator, author, and literacy consultant)

Research has shown that phonics instruction is most effective when explicit and systematic. Your daily phonics lessons accomplish this. It is also essential that students practice their phonetics knowledge in many contexts. Spark reading can help!

Choose a Bug Club Decodable Book from a set you have been teaching.
Read the book through once with students, inviting them to read with you when they can.
Choose the most recently taught grapheme or one that is trickiest for your students.
Explain that you are going to read the book a second time and they are going to watch for the chosen grapheme. Each time they see it, they will respond in the way that the class has decided on for that day: finger on nose, hands on head, stand up/sit down.
When you read the book the second time through, watch to see that students are noticing the grapheme.

For extra practice, you may choose to assign that book (or another from the same set) to students for independent reading!