Visitors from JIS

A big group of teachers came to see the 'word inquiry work' we are doing in our class. 

They asked us questions and observed our discussions and thinking.

We showed the teachers how to construct the flowchart to help our thinking when adding suffixes. 

We explained how the flowchart worked.

We started a new investigation about the 'Long A' while the teachers watched us.
We wanted to show them that spelling is a THINKING activity not a memorisation activity.

We revised the vowels:
a e i o u
and sometimes
the y

Playing the trading game to understand the meaning of the words for our investigation.
 Looking for the long <A> graphemes.

The teachers were impressed with our knowledge, thinking and focus!

Looks like Mrs Lyn is telling us something important!

Look how we can focus on our learning and work even though there were lots of teachers in the room!

Visit to Mr. Jim's House - Exploring Sulawesi

We visited our house to look at some artefacts and do some sketching. It seemed that the fish pond was the biggest highlight!

"Who is this knocking at my gate?"

We drew maps on the way.

At the dining table

Looking at some old photos of Tana Toraja. 

A box from Kalimantan

Spindle

I like collecting parangs and mandaus. This one was from Sulawesi.

Tau taus are famous in Tana Toraja.

He has real hair.

Sketching the tau-tau

Understanding the final e

The single silent <E> is a crucial pattern in English. To know about this pattern we need to also understand what vowels and vowel suffixes are.  These photos show us investigating the pattern as a whole group.

We collected suffixes and sorted them.

We had a flowchart that helps us organise our thoughts.

Checking to see if it works.

Using our body movement to aid memory.

An action box: Just add the suffix.

Trying it out in our books.

Interesting suffixes!

Boring suffixes!

An interesting suffix starts with a vowel. It might do something interesting to the base.

Learning from Love

When children are investigating word structure we ask a few simple questions.

First we form a hypothesis on what the the structure of the word is, then we ask...

• What does it mean?
• What is its structure?
• Where does it come from?

When you are able to investigate words in this way then much harder looking words become more easily understood. The stories about the history of words often helps a word's spelling stick in long term memory.

Here we investigated the word <love> which on the surface has an unusual spelling and is often misspelled by many children. By creating word webs children not only learn the target word <love> but learn a lot about suffixing in general.

The history of the word shows why there is an <o> in <love>.

These are all part of the word family.

Beginning a word web.

A finished word web.