August 2, 2024 • 43 mins
Heidi Anne Mesmer discusses her book Big Words for Young Readers. She emphasizes the importance of teaching young readers to decode and understand words with multiple syllables and morphemes. Heidi Anne highlights the need to teach morphemic concepts early on and provides recommendations for teaching different types of morphemes at each grade level. She explains that morphology, the study of word parts, is a crucial component of reading comprehension and vocabulary development. Mesmer provides practical strategies for teaching morphology, such as teaching the morphological principle and using activities like 'Make It Big' to build students' confidence in creating big words. She also emphasizes the need for explicit instruction in morphology from an early age and highlights the benefits of using cognates and word chains to support multilingual learners.
Takeaways
- The book Big Words for Young Readers focuses on teaching young readers to decode and understand words with multiple syllables and morphemes.
- Syllables are sound units, while morphemes are the smallest units of sound that carry meaning in a word.
- Teaching morphemic concepts early on can help students distinguish the meaningful parts of words.
- There is no strict scope and sequence for teaching morphemes, but it is important to consider the frequency and applicability of different types of morphemes at each grade level. Teaching morphology is essential for developing reading comprehension and vocabulary skills in young readers.
- Strategies like teaching the morphological principle and using activities like 'Make It Big' can help students understand and create big words.
- Explicit instruction in morphology should be integrated into phonics instruction from an early age.
- Cognates and word chains can be effective tools for supporting multilingual learners in developing their morphological knowledge.
Resources
- Big Words for Young Readers and the entire Scholastic Science of Reading in Practice book series!
- Monsters PI
We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Lori (00:01):
Something I'm always wishing that I could teach
better is morphology.
As a primary teacher, Iremember teaching endings such
as D or ED and that they meantthe word was in past tense, but
I don't remember teachingmorphology very often.
I thought that was more forintermediate or middle school
teachers to teach.
Melissa (00:19):
Yes, and as a middle school teacher myself, I found
that morphology wasn't alwaysintegrated into the curriculum.
We had vocabulary words fromthe texts, so I would sometimes
see a word that had a root likespect in inspect, and I would
tell my students what that meansto see and that it's, in other
words, like spectacles andspectator.
(00:39):
But I am sure that I missed aton of opportunities because I
was just pointing out morphemesas they came up and what I knew.
Lori (00:48):
Yeah, and we know it's important to teach morphology
with a clear structure.
Now we know that right Fromgrade level to grade level, but
it's tough to always knowexactly when to teach and how to
best teach it.
Melissa (01:00):
Yeah.
So we were super excited whenanother book launched from
Scholastic Science of Readingand Practice series, Big Words
for Young Readers, because itanswers our questions about
teaching multisyllabic words andmorphology in K through five.
Lori (01:15):
Yeah, we loved this book so much.
We found it so easy to read,just like all the other books in
the series.
We asked the author, heidi AnnMesmer, to be on the podcast to
share what she's learned aboutmorphology instruction.
Let's jump in.
Hi teacher friends.
I'm Lori and I'm Melissa.
We are two educators who wantthe best for all kids, and we
(01:37):
know you do too.
Melissa (01:39):
We worked together in Baltimore when the district
adopted a new literacycurriculum.
Lori (01:44):
We realized there was so much more to learn about how to
teach reading and writing.
Melissa (01:49):
Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.
Hi, welcome, heidi Ann.
Hi, so nice to see you all.
We're excited to have you back,it's great to be back.
All right, we are curious aboutthe title of your book.
So the title of your book isBig Words for Young Readers.
(02:10):
Why is it called Big Words forYoung Readers?
Yeah, and.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (02:13):
I'll add the subtitle in there Teaching kids
in grades K-5 to decode andunderstand.
So it's not just decoding now,it's understanding and decoding
words with multiple syllablesand more themes.
So I use that kind ofcolloquial term big words for
(02:34):
two reasons.
One of them is just that thatis kind of, I think, what people
in school think, and I thinkthat's how little kids feel
about words.
When they come to a word thatis long and hard and it's got
multiple parts, it's a big word,and so I just thought this
(02:55):
would resonate with teachersbecause it would really speak
exactly to the kinds of thingsthat they're seeing.
The other reason, however, wasto create kind of a catch-all
term, albeit very colloquial andnot scientific at all, to catch
the two things that make wordsbig, and those two things are
(03:16):
syllables and morphemes, andthey're actually not exactly the
same thing.
They do overlap, and oftentimesa syllable is a morpheme, but
not always.
So let me just kind of explainreally quickly.
So a syllable is a sound unit,right?
(03:38):
And our English system is notsyllabic in any kind of
systematic way.
It's not built on syllables,it's built on graphings and
phonemes and then it's built onmorphemes.
So a syllable is just a unit ofsound.
A syllable will have a vowelsound in it.
A syllable can be just thatvowel sound or a vowel sound
(03:59):
with consonants around it, andthat vowel sound is you open
your mouth and that vowel soundcan be sustained, right, right.
So we like to say that syllablesare the song of language, if
you will, so let me give you aword that is one syllable but
(04:20):
two morphemes, just to kind ofillustrate what a morpheme
actually is.
Because a lot of people areusing those two terms
multisyllabic to meanmultimorphemic, and they're not
the same.
So if I gave you the word likecats, cats, it's only one
syllable, right, but it's twomorphemes, yeah, right.
(04:42):
So a morpheme is the smallestunit of sound that carries
meaning in a word, and somemorphemes are like just words.
They can stand by themselves,they're called free morphemes,
and others are bound, they can'tstand by themselves, but they
do carry meaning and attach it.
And then the word cats the S isadded onto the end to mean not
(05:06):
one, right?
So the idea is, if you knowthat as a teacher, if you
understand that as a teacher,you can start helping kids to
distinguish the morphemicelements of words as soon as
they're in kindergarten, you cansay, instead of just saying
this has an S on the end, youcan say there are two meaningful
(05:28):
parts in this word at a verydevelopmentally appropriate
place or way.
So that was kind of why I cameup with big words, because I
wanted to fold in someinformation about syllables.
Syllables are kind of a littlebaby step that you can use
Anytime you can find a morphemein a word you want to use that.
(05:50):
But there are words that havemore than one syllable but
they're just one meaningful unit, like button.
It's not like you break downbutton and B-U-T means a round
fastener, o-u-n, t-o-n means thetwo holes in the middle.
Nope, nope, it all goestogether.
(06:10):
Same with elephant.
Like elephant doesn't mean likeElla means it's a large gray
animal and font means it has a,a trunk.
Now, maybe, maybe somewheredeep, deep down in etymology
there's more there, but I don'tknow that there is.
So the point is that sometimeswe can teach kids syllables when
(06:31):
a word has more than one ofthose syllables and they need
some kind of approach to be ableto decode it.
Lori (06:38):
Yeah, oh, I'm so glad that you mentioned that.
So Heidi and I want to go alittle bit deeper, because when
I saw big words I was like, oh,it's for K-5.
I'm kind of surprised.
It felt developmentallyinappropriate for the younger
grades to be exploring these bigwords.
(06:58):
Can you share a little bit moreabout that, right?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (07:01):
And I think that is an important kind of
thing to caveat.
And when I start talking aboutthis, the first thing I always
say is we are not talking abouttaking a word like sanctimonious
and pushing it down intokindergarten, right, we're not
talking about pushing down.
We're not talking aboutinappropriately force-fitting
(07:26):
Greek and Latin roots inkindergarten.
We're not talking aboutdisrupting what we know to be
high-quality, systematic andexplicit phonics, which is going
to be heavily single-syllablewords because we're trying to
teach the basic graphemes right.
So I just like to say that overand over again.
(07:49):
We're not talking aboutdisrupting basic phonics.
Most phonics will still besingle syllable.
What I was finding, both in myown practice and even writing,
and also when I talked toteachers, is that people were
making this division.
They were saying, okay, in K2,we teach single syllable, single
morpheme words and when we getto three through five, we teach
(08:13):
multi morphemic, multi syllabicwords, structural analysis.
People call that structuralanalysis and that division is
absolutely not research-basedand it doesn't even coordinate
with the kinds of words kids seein their texts.
Like in first grade over 40% ofwords can be more than one
(08:34):
syllable.
So we can't wait until thirdgrade if kids are seeing a lot
of multi-syllabic andmulti-morphemic words.
Further, there are word partsthat you just that you can't get
around in first grade textslike I-N-G or E-D or E-R.
(08:56):
Those are morphemes, right, orcompound words, and a lot of
teachers are teaching thesethings, but you just didn't see
a lot of technique, a lot ofinformation about why you needed
to do that, and so myperspective is that part of what
is really important is that westart to teach kind of concepts,
(09:20):
morphemic concepts, morphemicconcepts early on, when we can
like that s okay, that's ameaningful unit, um, and if you
think about it like this so whenwe teach, there are two layers
of english spelling there's thegrapheme phoneme right and then
there's the morpheme.
(09:40):
When we teach grapheme phonemes, we teach kids, uh, teach kids
how that system works.
So here's an example Well,here's a consonant by itself.
Now here's two consonantstogether.
This one's a cluster.
You're just going to say bothsounds.
And here's another example oftwo consonants by themselves,
(10:00):
but they're only going to showone sound.
So here's SH.
When you see SH together, it'sa digraph and we label it for
kids.
We label it to tell them thatthere are different things in
the graphemic system that dodifferent, have different
purposes.
Similarly, when we teach kidsmeaningful units, we need to
teach them the categories.
(10:22):
This is a base element, this isa base word or a bound root,
this is a prefix, this is aninflectional suffix, this is a
derivational suffix, and thoseall do different things.
The base element carries themain meaning.
The prefix is going to be addedonto the beginning.
It has a specific function.
It changes meaning and itchanges meaning in one of three
(10:45):
ways.
So here I'll give you someexamples and you can tell me
Unlock, nonstop, misunderstand,opposite, negate, yeah, yeah, it
changes, it negates the meaningof the base element.
So non-stop, in you have theword stop, which means to stop,
(11:05):
and you put not on the front andit means the opposite of that.
Right, exactly like you said,it negates, intensifies.
So like hyperthermia, superhuman, makes it more, or it
redirectss, it changes thedirection.
Preview review, midway right.
Lori (11:25):
Which would be so fun for kids.
I mean so fun for kids to learnabout right.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (11:31):
Right and you need to know.
It just changes the meaning andyou could do cartoons on that
and comics on that.
You could even like do charades, you could do like prefix
charades where I'm stopping, I'mnonstop, you know.
So you know that's the kind ofstuff we need to.
Like inflections we need toteach kids how does that work?
They just add grammaticalinformation in one of about six
(11:54):
or seven different ways.
Derivational inflections theydo something different.
So we don't need to turn kidsinto linguists and we don't need
to become linguists, but weneed to know how the system
works, in the same way that weknow hey, a silent E signals
that long or tense sound.
Hey, two vowels together areusually not just going to
represent the typical wax sound,you know.
And so that's what I didn't seeand that's part of what I got
(12:17):
motivated about.
Melissa (12:19):
I'm wondering you already did some of this,
heidi-ann, but I'm wondering Iknow I'm thinking as a teacher
and I kind of would want to know, and I didn't know this as a
teacher, like what should I beteaching at the different grade
levels?
You know, I was never reallyquite sure at my grade level
which morphemes, which type, youknow, what should I even be
pointing out to students at thislevel?
(12:40):
Do you have somerecommendations and some, maybe
some examples for the differentgrade levels?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (12:46):
Yeah, yeah, and you know what I'm thinking.
I was just using some two wordsthat I want to make sure
everybody understands, becausethere's a distinction out there
between two different types ofsuffixes.
Lori (12:58):
If you don't mind, that I think people need to understand
I would love to hear I wastaking notes while you were
talking, yeah.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (13:05):
So people just use the word suffix in a
very kind of.
They use it in a kind of likenon-specific and general way and
there are actually twodifferent types of suffixes, two
different things.
Inflectional suffixes are likeadding S, pluralizing, or adding
(13:27):
S to make third person the verbtense, or adding ED to make
past tense, or EN to make likebitten written, which is perfect
tense, or turning I and Gmaking a progressive happening.
Now those are inflectionalsuffixes.
There's about six to sevencategories.
They come in really early.
(13:48):
Kids have to learn them reallyoften early but then they're
done right.
It's kind of like it's abounded, it's a closer.
But these other kinds ofsuffixes, we do have
developmental knowledge thatthey're harder and they're
called kinds of suffixes.
We do have developmentalknowledge that they're harder
and they're called derivationalsuffixes and these actually do
change the part of speech of aword.
(14:09):
So when you do an inflection,like when you add S to a word,
that's an inflection.
You have cat, and then you addan S, it's still a noun, right.
If it's run, and then you, youknow, you put an S on the end,
it's still a verb, runs right,run, running, it's still a verb.
But derivational suffixesmostly change the part of speech
(14:30):
of a word.
So like, for example, if youhave the adjective happy and
then you add ness, you had happy, it was an adjective, now
happiness is a noun right.
And then, like, if you say itI-O-N, you take a verb, you add
I-O-N, act, i-o-n, now it's anoun right.
(14:52):
And there are lots of thesethat go back and forth and
they're harder and they go wayfurther into high school,
college and career.
So for example, like take, uh,take the derivational suffix,
archy, right, anarchy, monarchyYou're going to hear that in
(15:14):
high school, um, but somethinglike L-Y, you know, you're going
to hear in first grade, happily.
Et cetera.
The reason we have derivationalsuffixes is because they allow
us to take a word and I sayexpand it horizontally so that
it can be used in a disciplinein lots of different ways.
So take the word revolt You'rein history and you're talking
(15:38):
about a revolt, but you want towrite a sentence that talks
about the noun.
So now it becomes a revolution,and then it becomes
revolutionary if you want todescribe a battle or a war.
So these words are used indisciplines, or even used in
educational disciplines, so thatwe can take a concept and it
(16:01):
can fit in syntactically lots ofdifferent ways.
So that's a long.
The reason I mentioned that isbecause derivational suffixes
will come later in elementaryschool and there's research to
tell us that.
Now back to your real question.
So here's what I did in thisbook, okay.
So let me just ask you aquestion too.
(16:21):
Okay, so if I said what'swhat's a loose kind of sequence
for teaching phonics, like ifyou've got a kid in front of you
and you're going to teach himphonics, what would be kind of
some words or categories youwould use to to talk about
phonics?
Like first we would do this andthen maybe that and then this?
Okay, what do you like me,melissa, I to talk about phonics
?
Like first we would do this andthen maybe that and then this?
Lori (16:41):
Okay, what do you like me, melissa?
I have my handy phonics scopeand sequence that I keep on my
desk.
Uh, I, I would maybe start withlike short vowel sounds Um, I'm
sorry, consonant letter soundsshort vowel sounds like CVC
words, and then move into I'mtrying to think like maybe later
on blends and you know, thenconsonant digraphs and then
(17:05):
multi-syllabic words.
Am I hitting any kind of things?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (17:08):
here.
Yeah, so here's the thing.
I hope I'm right, heidi, you'reso smart, you're totally right.
No, no, no, you're totallyright.
The whole point is and most,most K-2 teachers actually are
very conversant in those termsthose are terms that they just
have in their mind, and what Iwanted to do with this book was
(17:30):
to have those kind of broadcategories to around big words,
to also be conversant.
Lori (17:37):
I think that's so helpful, heidi-ann, because then
teachers can say, oh gosh, I'mteaching this and it aligns with
this.
And then here's how I see itgrow over time, right.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (17:48):
And so there's just a, there's a
collection of things that youjust kind of have to know and
like that was one of them.
So with big words I started K1and it was like, first, big
words are simply compound words,like decodable compounds.
If you can read sun and you canread spot, you can read sunspot
.
If you can read sun and tan,you can read suntan.
So inflections, inflectionalendings like S, e, r, I and G,
(18:14):
without any spelling changes,yeah, that's what I was just
going to ask about, right,spelling changes.
Yeah, that's what I was justgoing to ask about, right.
So in K1, and I'll, I can talkabout that in a minute but there
are certain kinds of words thatyou don't.
You don't have to wait, you canright away put an ING on it
because it's going to, it's notgoing to change, and then
(18:40):
contractions would be K1.
Next, and, if you want to,syllable types.
A lot of the common core hassyllable types and a lot of
state standards have syllabletypes, even the meaningful unit.
But syllable types are useful,especially with words like that
(19:02):
button and where there's a oneunbound morpheme.
That's grade one, two, gradetwo, through four prefixes, and
then you start to get intoinflectional suffixes with
spelling changes.
I think second grade is a greattime to doubling and drop the Y
and add I-E-S and thenintroducing derivational
(19:27):
suffixes there, the more commonones, as well as doing some
common prefixes.
And then in fourth and fifthgrades, starting out with those
Greek and Latin roots which arebase elements that carry the
main meaning in a word but theycan't stand alone most of the
time, like cred, right,incredible, credit, credible.
(19:51):
So those are a little harderfor kids because they're not
words that they can immediatelyzero in on in a word.
So you have to kind ofexplicitly teach them those.
But once you do, I rememberlearning.
Melissa (20:04):
Those for SAT prep.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (20:05):
Yeah, yeah, well, an outrageous amount of
words in English, especiallyabove third grade, have those
elements in them.
So they're very useful.
But you're only getting startedin late elementary school with
those things.
So it's kind of like you'regoing to teach inflections, kind
(20:26):
of.
Get that done through thirdgrade and then really common
prefixes and then somederivational suffixes and some
Greek and Latin roots and thereisn't, from my reading of the
research, a real strict kind ofscope and sequence.
(20:46):
You can kind of use a couplesources of information to inform
when you teach what One is itgoing to show up in text and two
, is it really frequent?
So what I've listed in the bookaround prefixes and
derivational suffixes are onesthat are going to come up a lot,
(21:07):
that are highly applicable reand on and ion and those kinds
of things.
There is a little bit ofresearch that tells us
derivational suffixes start tocome into focus in third, fourth
, fifth grade.
So truthfully, you can teachGreek and Latin roots in first
or second grade.
There's nothing, you're notgoing to hurt anybody and
(21:31):
especially if you're in adiscipline right Like.
So Nell Duke has this wonderful, great first date curriculum
that she has and I think shedoes a water unit in the primary
grades, and so she introduceshydro, right.
Why not Right?
The kids are going to comeacross that right.
So there aren't any hard andfast rules, but I kind of lay
out this broad set of insequence for for for the reason
(21:52):
that K2 teachers need to have toknow where they're going,
teachers need common language,and then there should be
vertical alignment from K tofive.
Lori (22:00):
Yes, it's so helpful to hear so much about the what and
to hear you give such specificexamples in here and, just like
a little plug, your book has somany more examples too.
Obviously, we're only like anhour less than an hour podcast,
a whole list at the end which Iknow teachers love lists.
Melissa (22:22):
I wanted to highlight everything on your list and I
didn't.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (22:24):
The appendix is Right.
Well, and that is my big hope.
There are two things I'll justsay.
This book was edited by areally marvelous editor at
Scholastic and he edited JuliaLindsay.
He's edited the whole scienceof reading series.
I read Julia Lindsay's book andI tell people I read it at the
(22:45):
pool.
Exactly, and I wanted to emulatethat in this book because, um,
teachers need to know what theywant and need to know they don't
need extras, and so I imagineda teacher with the graphics
there's tons of graphics andthat was the other thing I, I,
about halfway through the book.
What I started doing isreversing my writing process,
(23:07):
where I designed all thegraphics first and then I wrote
around the graphics so that, andI would hope that people would
be tabbing, like, if you want toremember, okay, when do I
change the Y to I and add ES,you can tab it.
There's a little graphic forthat.
Or I need some some, you know,decodable compounds.
(23:28):
If kids know CVC words, there'sthe list for that.
So I worked really hard to makeit.
I, I, I imagined it beingtabbed, being a book you could
just pull open, and, yeah, Iwanted it to be that way.
Lori (23:43):
Yeah, well, I know that so many teachers are going to use
it, thinking about not only justwhat they're teaching, but how
they're teaching, and so I'mhoping we can talk a little bit
about that, heidi, and what areyour tips for effectively
teaching morphology?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (23:59):
Okay, are your tips for effectively
teaching morphology?
Okay, so a couple of things.
I'll start with little thingsthat you can do really early on.
So one of the things that youcan do with kids as soon as
you're teaching inflections isyou can teach them what I call
the morphological principle.
(24:20):
And the morphological principleis like this that basically
words are spelled consistentlyacross related words even if
they don't sound exactly thesame way.
So like, if you take theinflection E-D, it sounds one of
(24:40):
three ways T-E-D or D.
Right, but you can explain tokids that even if you hear the T
sound in English, if you'remaking a word past tense with
E-D, you always use E-D and whatyou're doing is illustrating
that morphological principle.
You can start to teach kids.
(25:01):
I have an activity called Makeit Big, which is in that first
big words chapter and you cantake.
There are certain words that youdon't have to do any spelling
changes when you add inflections.
So, for example, you could takea word like cook so you've
taught the OO and you can givekids that base cook.
And then you could give a wordlike cook, so you've taught the
O-O and you can give kids thatbase cook, and then you could
(25:23):
give them some inflection.
Cooks, cooker.
Now, cooker is not aninflectional suffix there, it's
actually a derivational.
It means one who E-R isactually a word part.
That can be both aninflectional suffix and a
derivational.
Lori (25:38):
Ooh, that's tricky.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (25:39):
And now there's a little box in the, in
the, in the book, about that.
You can never say never inEnglish.
You can never say always inEnglish.
Never just doesn't work Then.
Or or I N, g, so they take thatbase, they can add the
inflections, then you cancompound it so you can make cook
top, cook book.
Or you can go the other way andI'm trying to think of a word
(26:01):
that has something cook on thefront.
Anyway, what you can do is,without making any spelling
changes, you're building kids'confidence in making big words.
You're showing them that oneword, that's a base, can become
lots of other words with otherbound morphemes.
That's an example.
I saw somebody doing a wordchain with kids around the O-W.
(26:25):
They were doing the O sound,grow, et cetera, and they, if
you are of the mindset that, hey, I could just show kids how
there are some morphemes in this, you could take that word chain
and add S right, or add I and Greally quickly and in the book.
(26:47):
What I essentially do is Iidentify, like, if you take a
typical phonics scope andsequence, I say okay, after
you've taught CVC words and thekids can really, really
automatically read them, you cando CVC words with S right away,
you don't have to wait.
Easy, add, light add.
After you've done words withconsonant clusters and digraphs,
(27:08):
you can take the E-D-I-N-G andE-R and put those on the end of
those words without any spellingchanges.
It doesn't work with ES, right,but you can do it, and so I've
just infused these.
I have this little chart here.
I get much more micro level inthe individual chapters where I
show you explicitly how to justlightly add in some big words.
(27:31):
A couple other quick kind oftips if you are in a k-5 school
and you want to think verticallyand talk to each other, you
could use a technique calledseek the parts you know spy, and
this one comes from.
I want to make sure I get itright.
I think this is the love itseries of studies.
(27:55):
But seek the parts you know isreally flexible because it's
simply what parts do you see?
So if you know a morpheme, youcan look for that.
If you know prefix, you canlook for that.
If you don't know a morphemebut you see a syllable type, you
can look for that, and it justtrains kids to look at words as
if they are parts, and that'spart of the problem right.
(28:16):
We're always on this soundedout thing, and really sounded
out only works for CBC words,cbcc words, right, it just
doesn't work for a lot of otherwords, and so that's another
thing.
Kind of one of the principles isthat all of word instruction is
build it up, take, you know,it's like you build it up, you
break.
It's like you build it up, youbreak it down.
(28:37):
You build it up, you break itdown.
That's kind of what you'redoing with kids.
So they come to a word likedesensitizing.
All right, how can we break itup?
We see an, I and G, we see D.
What do we see in the middle?
Here?
We see wow, three vowels, thatmust be three syllables.
Sen okay, I've gotClosedCellBalls, sendsit, okay,
(29:01):
and they can break it down.
So I mean that's kind of theoverarching, you know, kind of
idea.
The other thing I would say iswe have a lot of multilingual
learners, many of whom areSpanish.
Really, taking advantage ofcognates like información,
policia, immigration are anotherreally exciting way to to kind
(29:23):
of bring kids into theirLatinate roots of English and
and amplify your, your Spanishspeaking multilingual learners.
So there are lots of differenttechniques that you can use.
There are morpheme triangles.
You can take a word root andkind of explode it.
What are all the differentwords you can make with spect,
(29:45):
spectacle et cetera.
So I've got lists in the back,list of decodable compounds,
I've got word equations and kindof step, how do you go through
these things?
And you can use chat GPT.
A lot of times you can justenter in, you can say give me,
(30:06):
give me 10, you know, give me 10compound words with cat in them
.
And you can, you can have thoseright there.
Lori (30:20):
Never even thought of that .
Heidi Anne Mesmer (30:21):
Catnip, I'm your own chat GPT right here I
thought of one, Right, right,Well, I mean, sometimes it comes
up with things you're like notreally, but you know like
catapult.
Melissa (30:31):
I'm wondering about assessment just because I don't
think I've heard very much aboutassessing morphology, although
listening to you today it's likeit seems so important.
But do you have anyrecommendations for assessments
for morphology specifically orother?
Maybe assessments teachers arealready giving that could tell
them something about what theirstudents know about morphology?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (30:59):
about what their students know about
morphology.
Yeah, so I think because youknow, because it hasn't been a
big part of the K-5 dialogue, wehaven't seen a whole lot of
morphological assessments.
A lot of what you see aredecoding inventories which
assess kids' abilities to justpronounce the word right.
And it's important to rememberthat morphology is not just
(31:20):
decoding but understanding themeaningful unit in the word.
So you know, a decodinginventory doesn't completely get
at morphology.
There's a wonderful site thatGoodwin et al has put out there
called Monsters and it's awebsite that you can go to and
(31:42):
they have a real like.
It's a cool gamified approachto morphology assessment that
asks kids to do things like takea route and decide what
morphological part of the familywould go in a word.
So, for example, you might takea word like finance and it
(32:02):
might say the word, the sentencemight say something like he had
excellent blank skills.
That financial is the one thatwould go there.
That derived adjective or kids'abilities to take parts off and
be able to tell you what theymean.
(32:23):
You can use spelling inventories.
Spelling inventories also willoften capture.
Can kids make those spellingchanges with inflections?
Do they know, for example, likewhy don't we spell accident
A-K-S-U-D-U-N-D in T, right,well you know.
Or electricity, right, there'sthat base word, electric, and in
(32:49):
English we spell thingsvisually similar to the word
that they're related to, even ifthere's a shift in the spelling
, I mean in the sound you hear.
So, like in electric, the Cbecomes soft in certain words.
But you don't use an S, right,and a lot of times those changes
you'll see are really around avoiced or unvoiced variation of
(33:15):
consonant sound.
So, like the S at the end ofwords that can either be the
soft sound or the Z sound.
It actually, if you think aboutit from a pronunciation
standpoint, that S at the end ismore often going to say the
voiced Z sound, say the voiced zsound.
But we don't spell it that way,right?
(33:36):
Um, I kind of got off guard.
Anyway, the decodinginventories, the spelling
inventories and then the realtrue morphological assessments
are things that you can use.
I would say, with the decodinginventories and probably the
spelling inventories, I wouldreally love it if there were
more items, right, you know, alot of times you don't like, you
(34:00):
know you don't have items forall of the different ones, right
, it's just a sampling?
Melissa (34:05):
Yeah, it is All right.
So let's take a quick step backand think about why morphology
should be something teachersprioritize, and I, specifically,
am curious about what theresearch says about teaching
morphology and if you can sharea little bit of what the
research says.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (34:21):
Yeah, so what we know is that there is a
relationship between kids'comprehension and their
vocabulary knowledge as a resultof knowing the meaningful parts
of words, and so that allowsthem to really hang on to the
(34:48):
meanings of words and totransfer that and also to, as
they're reading and get older,to gather information about what
a word might mean based on itsmorphology.
So there's a number ofmeta-analyses that tell us that
(35:10):
that kids really benefit fromexplicit instruction in that,
that kids really benefit fromexplicit instruction in that and
that, depending on the outcome,it's usually vocabulary and
comprehension which would makesense, because morphology is
really the crossover betweendecoding and comprehension.
(35:31):
Right, it's, it's both things.
It's wrapped, it's it'sdecoding the word, but then
knowing how the parts of theword contribute to the meaning,
above and beyond the baseelement or the base word or the
root.
So it is both of those thingsand that's why kids really need
it and it's the thing that'sreally important too is that it
(35:54):
is the second layer, if you will, of our English system.
Yes, we're an alphabetic system,yes, there's a relationship
between visual symbols andsounds, but the next layer is
that those graphemes buildmorphemes, build words, and
(36:14):
we've kind of just in elementaryschool gone from grapheme,
phoneme word.
But there's this other part inthere and that is morpheme.
I don't even think a lot ofteachers even know what bound
morphemes are.
I mean, like they intuitivelyknow, right, Like you know, they
know the parts.
They might use the word suffixor prefix, but the class of kind
(36:39):
of word parts is is morphology.
And my, one of my big kind ofthings with this book is that's
just language teachers should becomfortable with and not
because they need to impresspeople or, like you know, I'm
not into this.
We've got to scientize thingsfor the sake of scientizing them
and making them legitimate andrigorous.
(37:00):
We just it's a, it's part ofthe system, right.
And the same way that you needto have some language to talk to
kids about categories ofgraphemes, you need to have that
with morphology and morphemes.
So I think it's reallyimportant that that becomes
something that teachers arefluent in, so because then they
can they can take off and do abetter job than anybody.
(37:23):
So it's we've just missed, likeit should be a pillar, Like
it's just like a huge omission.
I mean, I would not.
I don't think morphology isphonics, I don't think that's
accurate.
It's just this omission that,like people are not paying
attention to or what weren't,and we need it to be there and
(37:43):
we can have it be there in veryappropriate ways from the
beginning.
Lori (37:47):
Well, I'm so glad that you wrote a whole book about it for
the entire world.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (37:51):
Oh well, I'm.
I'm glad this is not acomprehensive book.
It's a kind of taste and if youare teaching, you know, in
middle school or secondaryschool you're going to need a
lot more detail there.
But I think in elementaryschool we can make it a lot
easier by building a big wordsmindset, by teaching kids how
(38:13):
these categories of meaningfulunits work, so that when the kid
gets to you know sixth grade,they know how the system works
and it's not just left to rightsounded out.
Lori (38:27):
Yeah, and I think previously, you know, it used to
be like kind of an implicitthing, like, oh well, obviously
they'll kind of like, I mean, orhere and there you would teach,
but not anything systematic.
At least for me and myexperience right, being in the
classroom like it was like, oh,they'll kind of figure out.
Like unlock means, like yousaid, like the opposite of
locked right, so the door'sunlocked, it's okay.
(38:49):
But I love the idea of havingstructure around this really
important piece and I think it'sa question that teachers ask a
whole lot.
I know Melissa and I talk aboutit a lot, we ask a lot of
questions about it and you'renot our first guest to talk
about it, but you're our firstguest to really kind of bring
(39:10):
this to K-5 so explicitly.
So we're really grateful to youfor that, thanks.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (39:18):
Yeah, and I think we can easily add it into
scope and sequence for phonicswithout disrupting anything.
It's very easy.
Add early on, very easy add.
And that's a big message too,because if you can't, if you
can't decode, like, say, youcome to the multi-morphemic word
delightedly, but you don't knowIGHT, you're not going to word
delightedly, but you don't knowI-G-H-T, you're not going to
decode delightedly if you don'tknow the base grapheme, the
(39:41):
graphemes in the base element.
So you have to do that right.
We're not talking aboutdisrupting that, but that's not
enough.
Lori (39:50):
You have to have more than that.
Would you want to leave ourlisteners with one last thing
about big words or teachingmulti-syllabic or
multi-morphemic words?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (40:02):
Now I'm getting really good at saying
that what I would say is ifyou're listening to this and
you're like morpheme,derivational, what?
Yeah, I don't want it.
If that's what you're thinking,the book is designed to make
those things very understandableand to lean very heavily on
(40:23):
graphics, very heavily ongraphics.
Tell me, teachers don't need toknow that.
So if you're a person who, whensomebody says morpheme, you go
what is she talking about?
Is she talking about the drug?
What does she mean?
Because it's a weird word.
(40:50):
Right, this is the book for you.
It's a first taste.
It is a first taste and itmight make you curious to really
really start going out thereand looking at a lot of other
really great resources.
We just can't let this go.
We can't.
Just it can't be implicit,absolutely not.
Lori (41:06):
So yeah, and the message I hear too is that we just can't
wait.
We cannot wait until upperelementary, you know, just till
fifth grade and sixth grade andon, to be teaching morphemes, or
you know, we can't, it's too.
Not that it's too late, it'sjust we're wasting time and
opportunity earlier.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (41:25):
Right, and it's kind of like that learning
to read, reading to learn, fakedivision.
Do you know what I mean?
It's the same thing.
It all sounds and I admit tobeing part and party to that
kind of division in this area itall sounded really useful and
then it doesn't make any sensebecause kids actually have to
read words that aremultisyllabic and multimorphemic
(41:46):
, almost immediately Simple ones, but they still have to do it.
Lori (41:51):
Well, we are so, so grateful that you took some time
to talk with us today, and wecan't wait for everyone to run
out and grab Big Words.
I'll read the full title againfor you it is Big Words for
Young Readers, teaching Kids inGrades K-5 to Decode and
Understand Words with MultipleSyllables and More Themes.
So it's available at theScholastic Teacher Store, on
(42:12):
Amazon, your local bookstore,wherever you buy books.
Heidi-ann, you're the best.
We love big words, thank you.
Melissa (42:18):
Take care To stay connected with us.
Sign up for our email list atliteracypodcastcom, Join our
Facebook group and follow us onInstagram and Twitter.
Lori (42:32):
If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share
with a teacher friend or leaveus a five-star rating and review
on Apple Podcasts.
Melissa (42:42):
Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions
expressed by the hosts andguests of the Melissa and Lori
Love Literacy Podcast are notnecessarily the opinions of
Great Minds PBC or its employees.
We appreciate you so much andwe're so glad you're here to
learn with us of Great Minds.
Lori (42:54):
PBC for its employees.
We appreciate you so much andwe're so glad you're here to
learn with us.
Something I'm always wishing that I could teach
better is morphology.
As a primary teacher, Iremember teaching endings such
as D or ED and that they meantthe word was in past tense, but
I don't remember teachingmorphology very often.
I thought that was more forintermediate or middle school
teachers to teach.
Melissa (00:19):
Yes, and as a middle school teacher myself, I found
that morphology wasn't alwaysintegrated into the curriculum.
We had vocabulary words fromthe texts, so I would sometimes
see a word that had a root likespect in inspect, and I would
tell my students what that meansto see and that it's, in other
words, like spectacles andspectator.
(00:39):
But I am sure that I missed aton of opportunities because I
was just pointing out morphemesas they came up and what I knew.
Lori (00:48):
Yeah, and we know it's important to teach morphology
with a clear structure.
Now we know that right Fromgrade level to grade level, but
it's tough to always knowexactly when to teach and how to
best teach it.
Melissa (01:00):
Yeah.
So we were super excited whenanother book launched from
Scholastic Science of Readingand Practice series, Big Words
for Young Readers, because itanswers our questions about
teaching multisyllabic words andmorphology in K through five.
Lori (01:15):
Yeah, we loved this book so much.
We found it so easy to read,just like all the other books in
the series.
We asked the author, heidi AnnMesmer, to be on the podcast to
share what she's learned aboutmorphology instruction.
Let's jump in.
Hi teacher friends.
I'm Lori and I'm Melissa.
We are two educators who wantthe best for all kids, and we
(01:37):
know you do too.
Melissa (01:39):
We worked together in Baltimore when the district
adopted a new literacycurriculum.
Lori (01:44):
We realized there was so much more to learn about how to
teach reading and writing.
Melissa (01:49):
Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.
Hi, welcome, heidi Ann.
Hi, so nice to see you all.
We're excited to have you back,it's great to be back.
All right, we are curious aboutthe title of your book.
So the title of your book isBig Words for Young Readers.
(02:10):
Why is it called Big Words forYoung Readers?
Yeah, and.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (02:13):
I'll add the subtitle in there Teaching kids
in grades K-5 to decode andunderstand.
So it's not just decoding now,it's understanding and decoding
words with multiple syllablesand more themes.
So I use that kind ofcolloquial term big words for
(02:34):
two reasons.
One of them is just that thatis kind of, I think, what people
in school think, and I thinkthat's how little kids feel
about words.
When they come to a word thatis long and hard and it's got
multiple parts, it's a big word,and so I just thought this
(02:55):
would resonate with teachersbecause it would really speak
exactly to the kinds of thingsthat they're seeing.
The other reason, however, wasto create kind of a catch-all
term, albeit very colloquial andnot scientific at all, to catch
the two things that make wordsbig, and those two things are
(03:16):
syllables and morphemes, andthey're actually not exactly the
same thing.
They do overlap, and oftentimesa syllable is a morpheme, but
not always.
So let me just kind of explainreally quickly.
So a syllable is a sound unit,right?
(03:38):
And our English system is notsyllabic in any kind of
systematic way.
It's not built on syllables,it's built on graphings and
phonemes and then it's built onmorphemes.
So a syllable is just a unit ofsound.
A syllable will have a vowelsound in it.
A syllable can be just thatvowel sound or a vowel sound
(03:59):
with consonants around it, andthat vowel sound is you open
your mouth and that vowel soundcan be sustained, right, right.
So we like to say that syllablesare the song of language, if
you will, so let me give you aword that is one syllable but
(04:20):
two morphemes, just to kind ofillustrate what a morpheme
actually is.
Because a lot of people areusing those two terms
multisyllabic to meanmultimorphemic, and they're not
the same.
So if I gave you the word likecats, cats, it's only one
syllable, right, but it's twomorphemes, yeah, right.
(04:42):
So a morpheme is the smallestunit of sound that carries
meaning in a word, and somemorphemes are like just words.
They can stand by themselves,they're called free morphemes,
and others are bound, they can'tstand by themselves, but they
do carry meaning and attach it.
And then the word cats the S isadded onto the end to mean not
(05:06):
one, right?
So the idea is, if you knowthat as a teacher, if you
understand that as a teacher,you can start helping kids to
distinguish the morphemicelements of words as soon as
they're in kindergarten, you cansay, instead of just saying
this has an S on the end, youcan say there are two meaningful
(05:28):
parts in this word at a verydevelopmentally appropriate
place or way.
So that was kind of why I cameup with big words, because I
wanted to fold in someinformation about syllables.
Syllables are kind of a littlebaby step that you can use
Anytime you can find a morphemein a word you want to use that.
(05:50):
But there are words that havemore than one syllable but
they're just one meaningful unit, like button.
It's not like you break downbutton and B-U-T means a round
fastener, o-u-n, t-o-n means thetwo holes in the middle.
Nope, nope, it all goestogether.
(06:10):
Same with elephant.
Like elephant doesn't mean likeElla means it's a large gray
animal and font means it has a,a trunk.
Now, maybe, maybe somewheredeep, deep down in etymology
there's more there, but I don'tknow that there is.
So the point is that sometimeswe can teach kids syllables when
(06:31):
a word has more than one ofthose syllables and they need
some kind of approach to be ableto decode it.
Lori (06:38):
Yeah, oh, I'm so glad that you mentioned that.
So Heidi and I want to go alittle bit deeper, because when
I saw big words I was like, oh,it's for K-5.
I'm kind of surprised.
It felt developmentallyinappropriate for the younger
grades to be exploring these bigwords.
(06:58):
Can you share a little bit moreabout that, right?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (07:01):
And I think that is an important kind of
thing to caveat.
And when I start talking aboutthis, the first thing I always
say is we are not talking abouttaking a word like sanctimonious
and pushing it down intokindergarten, right, we're not
talking about pushing down.
We're not talking aboutinappropriately force-fitting
(07:26):
Greek and Latin roots inkindergarten.
We're not talking aboutdisrupting what we know to be
high-quality, systematic andexplicit phonics, which is going
to be heavily single-syllablewords because we're trying to
teach the basic graphemes right.
So I just like to say that overand over again.
(07:49):
We're not talking aboutdisrupting basic phonics.
Most phonics will still besingle syllable.
What I was finding, both in myown practice and even writing,
and also when I talked toteachers, is that people were
making this division.
They were saying, okay, in K2,we teach single syllable, single
morpheme words and when we getto three through five, we teach
(08:13):
multi morphemic, multi syllabicwords, structural analysis.
People call that structuralanalysis and that division is
absolutely not research-basedand it doesn't even coordinate
with the kinds of words kids seein their texts.
Like in first grade over 40% ofwords can be more than one
(08:34):
syllable.
So we can't wait until thirdgrade if kids are seeing a lot
of multi-syllabic andmulti-morphemic words.
Further, there are word partsthat you just that you can't get
around in first grade textslike I-N-G or E-D or E-R.
(08:56):
Those are morphemes, right, orcompound words, and a lot of
teachers are teaching thesethings, but you just didn't see
a lot of technique, a lot ofinformation about why you needed
to do that, and so myperspective is that part of what
is really important is that westart to teach kind of concepts,
(09:20):
morphemic concepts, morphemicconcepts early on, when we can
like that s okay, that's ameaningful unit, um, and if you
think about it like this so whenwe teach, there are two layers
of english spelling there's thegrapheme phoneme right and then
there's the morpheme.
(09:40):
When we teach grapheme phonemes, we teach kids, uh, teach kids
how that system works.
So here's an example Well,here's a consonant by itself.
Now here's two consonantstogether.
This one's a cluster.
You're just going to say bothsounds.
And here's another example oftwo consonants by themselves,
(10:00):
but they're only going to showone sound.
So here's SH.
When you see SH together, it'sa digraph and we label it for
kids.
We label it to tell them thatthere are different things in
the graphemic system that dodifferent, have different
purposes.
Similarly, when we teach kidsmeaningful units, we need to
teach them the categories.
(10:22):
This is a base element, this isa base word or a bound root,
this is a prefix, this is aninflectional suffix, this is a
derivational suffix, and thoseall do different things.
The base element carries themain meaning.
The prefix is going to be addedonto the beginning.
It has a specific function.
It changes meaning and itchanges meaning in one of three
(10:45):
ways.
So here I'll give you someexamples and you can tell me
Unlock, nonstop, misunderstand,opposite, negate, yeah, yeah, it
changes, it negates the meaningof the base element.
So non-stop, in you have theword stop, which means to stop,
(11:05):
and you put not on the front andit means the opposite of that.
Right, exactly like you said,it negates, intensifies.
So like hyperthermia, superhuman, makes it more, or it
redirectss, it changes thedirection.
Preview review, midway right.
Lori (11:25):
Which would be so fun for kids.
I mean so fun for kids to learnabout right.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (11:31):
Right and you need to know.
It just changes the meaning andyou could do cartoons on that
and comics on that.
You could even like do charades, you could do like prefix
charades where I'm stopping, I'mnonstop, you know.
So you know that's the kind ofstuff we need to.
Like inflections we need toteach kids how does that work?
They just add grammaticalinformation in one of about six
(11:54):
or seven different ways.
Derivational inflections theydo something different.
So we don't need to turn kidsinto linguists and we don't need
to become linguists, but weneed to know how the system
works, in the same way that weknow hey, a silent E signals
that long or tense sound.
Hey, two vowels together areusually not just going to
represent the typical wax sound,you know.
And so that's what I didn't seeand that's part of what I got
(12:17):
motivated about.
Melissa (12:19):
I'm wondering you already did some of this,
heidi-ann, but I'm wondering Iknow I'm thinking as a teacher
and I kind of would want to know, and I didn't know this as a
teacher, like what should I beteaching at the different grade
levels?
You know, I was never reallyquite sure at my grade level
which morphemes, which type, youknow, what should I even be
pointing out to students at thislevel?
(12:40):
Do you have somerecommendations and some, maybe
some examples for the differentgrade levels?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (12:46):
Yeah, yeah, and you know what I'm thinking.
I was just using some two wordsthat I want to make sure
everybody understands, becausethere's a distinction out there
between two different types ofsuffixes.
Lori (12:58):
If you don't mind, that I think people need to understand
I would love to hear I wastaking notes while you were
talking, yeah.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (13:05):
So people just use the word suffix in a
very kind of.
They use it in a kind of likenon-specific and general way and
there are actually twodifferent types of suffixes, two
different things.
Inflectional suffixes are likeadding S, pluralizing, or adding
(13:27):
S to make third person the verbtense, or adding ED to make
past tense, or EN to make likebitten written, which is perfect
tense, or turning I and Gmaking a progressive happening.
Now those are inflectionalsuffixes.
There's about six to sevencategories.
They come in really early.
(13:48):
Kids have to learn them reallyoften early but then they're
done right.
It's kind of like it's abounded, it's a closer.
But these other kinds ofsuffixes, we do have
developmental knowledge thatthey're harder and they're
called kinds of suffixes.
We do have developmentalknowledge that they're harder
and they're called derivationalsuffixes and these actually do
change the part of speech of aword.
(14:09):
So when you do an inflection,like when you add S to a word,
that's an inflection.
You have cat, and then you addan S, it's still a noun, right.
If it's run, and then you, youknow, you put an S on the end,
it's still a verb, runs right,run, running, it's still a verb.
But derivational suffixesmostly change the part of speech
(14:30):
of a word.
So like, for example, if youhave the adjective happy and
then you add ness, you had happy, it was an adjective, now
happiness is a noun right.
And then, like, if you say itI-O-N, you take a verb, you add
I-O-N, act, i-o-n, now it's anoun right.
(14:52):
And there are lots of thesethat go back and forth and
they're harder and they go wayfurther into high school,
college and career.
So for example, like take, uh,take the derivational suffix,
archy, right, anarchy, monarchyYou're going to hear that in
(15:14):
high school, um, but somethinglike L-Y, you know, you're going
to hear in first grade, happily.
Et cetera.
The reason we have derivationalsuffixes is because they allow
us to take a word and I sayexpand it horizontally so that
it can be used in a disciplinein lots of different ways.
So take the word revolt You'rein history and you're talking
(15:38):
about a revolt, but you want towrite a sentence that talks
about the noun.
So now it becomes a revolution,and then it becomes
revolutionary if you want todescribe a battle or a war.
So these words are used indisciplines, or even used in
educational disciplines, so thatwe can take a concept and it
(16:01):
can fit in syntactically lots ofdifferent ways.
So that's a long.
The reason I mentioned that isbecause derivational suffixes
will come later in elementaryschool and there's research to
tell us that.
Now back to your real question.
So here's what I did in thisbook, okay.
So let me just ask you aquestion too.
(16:21):
Okay, so if I said what'swhat's a loose kind of sequence
for teaching phonics, like ifyou've got a kid in front of you
and you're going to teach himphonics, what would be kind of
some words or categories youwould use to to talk about
phonics?
Like first we would do this andthen maybe that and then this?
Okay, what do you like me,melissa, I to talk about phonics
?
Like first we would do this andthen maybe that and then this?
Lori (16:41):
Okay, what do you like me, melissa?
I have my handy phonics scopeand sequence that I keep on my
desk.
Uh, I, I would maybe start withlike short vowel sounds Um, I'm
sorry, consonant letter soundsshort vowel sounds like CVC
words, and then move into I'mtrying to think like maybe later
on blends and you know, thenconsonant digraphs and then
(17:05):
multi-syllabic words.
Am I hitting any kind of things?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (17:08):
here.
Yeah, so here's the thing.
I hope I'm right, heidi, you'reso smart, you're totally right.
No, no, no, you're totallyright.
The whole point is and most,most K-2 teachers actually are
very conversant in those termsthose are terms that they just
have in their mind, and what Iwanted to do with this book was
(17:30):
to have those kind of broadcategories to around big words,
to also be conversant.
Lori (17:37):
I think that's so helpful, heidi-ann, because then
teachers can say, oh gosh, I'mteaching this and it aligns with
this.
And then here's how I see itgrow over time, right.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (17:48):
And so there's just a, there's a
collection of things that youjust kind of have to know and
like that was one of them.
So with big words I started K1and it was like, first, big
words are simply compound words,like decodable compounds.
If you can read sun and you canread spot, you can read sunspot
.
If you can read sun and tan,you can read suntan.
So inflections, inflectionalendings like S, e, r, I and G,
(18:14):
without any spelling changes,yeah, that's what I was just
going to ask about, right,spelling changes.
Yeah, that's what I was justgoing to ask about, right.
So in K1, and I'll, I can talkabout that in a minute but there
are certain kinds of words thatyou don't.
You don't have to wait, you canright away put an ING on it
because it's going to, it's notgoing to change, and then
(18:40):
contractions would be K1.
Next, and, if you want to,syllable types.
A lot of the common core hassyllable types and a lot of
state standards have syllabletypes, even the meaningful unit.
But syllable types are useful,especially with words like that
(19:02):
button and where there's a oneunbound morpheme.
That's grade one, two, gradetwo, through four prefixes, and
then you start to get intoinflectional suffixes with
spelling changes.
I think second grade is a greattime to doubling and drop the Y
and add I-E-S and thenintroducing derivational
(19:27):
suffixes there, the more commonones, as well as doing some
common prefixes.
And then in fourth and fifthgrades, starting out with those
Greek and Latin roots which arebase elements that carry the
main meaning in a word but theycan't stand alone most of the
time, like cred, right,incredible, credit, credible.
(19:51):
So those are a little harderfor kids because they're not
words that they can immediatelyzero in on in a word.
So you have to kind ofexplicitly teach them those.
But once you do, I rememberlearning.
Melissa (20:04):
Those for SAT prep.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (20:05):
Yeah, yeah, well, an outrageous amount of
words in English, especiallyabove third grade, have those
elements in them.
So they're very useful.
But you're only getting startedin late elementary school with
those things.
So it's kind of like you'regoing to teach inflections, kind
(20:26):
of.
Get that done through thirdgrade and then really common
prefixes and then somederivational suffixes and some
Greek and Latin roots and thereisn't, from my reading of the
research, a real strict kind ofscope and sequence.
(20:46):
You can kind of use a couplesources of information to inform
when you teach what One is itgoing to show up in text and two
, is it really frequent?
So what I've listed in the bookaround prefixes and
derivational suffixes are onesthat are going to come up a lot,
(21:07):
that are highly applicable reand on and ion and those kinds
of things.
There is a little bit ofresearch that tells us
derivational suffixes start tocome into focus in third, fourth
, fifth grade.
So truthfully, you can teachGreek and Latin roots in first
or second grade.
There's nothing, you're notgoing to hurt anybody and
(21:31):
especially if you're in adiscipline right Like.
So Nell Duke has this wonderful, great first date curriculum
that she has and I think shedoes a water unit in the primary
grades, and so she introduceshydro, right.
Why not Right?
The kids are going to comeacross that right.
So there aren't any hard andfast rules, but I kind of lay
out this broad set of insequence for for for the reason
(21:52):
that K2 teachers need to have toknow where they're going,
teachers need common language,and then there should be
vertical alignment from K tofive.
Lori (22:00):
Yes, it's so helpful to hear so much about the what and
to hear you give such specificexamples in here and, just like
a little plug, your book has somany more examples too.
Obviously, we're only like anhour less than an hour podcast,
a whole list at the end which Iknow teachers love lists.
Melissa (22:22):
I wanted to highlight everything on your list and I
didn't.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (22:24):
The appendix is Right.
Well, and that is my big hope.
There are two things I'll justsay.
This book was edited by areally marvelous editor at
Scholastic and he edited JuliaLindsay.
He's edited the whole scienceof reading series.
I read Julia Lindsay's book andI tell people I read it at the
(22:45):
pool.
Exactly, and I wanted to emulatethat in this book because, um,
teachers need to know what theywant and need to know they don't
need extras, and so I imagineda teacher with the graphics
there's tons of graphics andthat was the other thing I, I,
about halfway through the book.
What I started doing isreversing my writing process,
(23:07):
where I designed all thegraphics first and then I wrote
around the graphics so that, andI would hope that people would
be tabbing, like, if you want toremember, okay, when do I
change the Y to I and add ES,you can tab it.
There's a little graphic forthat.
Or I need some some, you know,decodable compounds.
(23:28):
If kids know CVC words, there'sthe list for that.
So I worked really hard to makeit.
I, I, I imagined it beingtabbed, being a book you could
just pull open, and, yeah, Iwanted it to be that way.
Lori (23:43):
Yeah, well, I know that so many teachers are going to use
it, thinking about not only justwhat they're teaching, but how
they're teaching, and so I'mhoping we can talk a little bit
about that, heidi, and what areyour tips for effectively
teaching morphology?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (23:59):
Okay, are your tips for effectively
teaching morphology?
Okay, so a couple of things.
I'll start with little thingsthat you can do really early on.
So one of the things that youcan do with kids as soon as
you're teaching inflections isyou can teach them what I call
the morphological principle.
(24:20):
And the morphological principleis like this that basically
words are spelled consistentlyacross related words even if
they don't sound exactly thesame way.
So like, if you take theinflection E-D, it sounds one of
(24:40):
three ways T-E-D or D.
Right, but you can explain tokids that even if you hear the T
sound in English, if you'remaking a word past tense with
E-D, you always use E-D and whatyou're doing is illustrating
that morphological principle.
You can start to teach kids.
(25:01):
I have an activity called Makeit Big, which is in that first
big words chapter and you cantake.
There are certain words that youdon't have to do any spelling
changes when you add inflections.
So, for example, you could takea word like cook so you've
taught the OO and you can givekids that base cook.
And then you could give a wordlike cook, so you've taught the
O-O and you can give kids thatbase cook, and then you could
(25:23):
give them some inflection.
Cooks, cooker.
Now, cooker is not aninflectional suffix there, it's
actually a derivational.
It means one who E-R isactually a word part.
That can be both aninflectional suffix and a
derivational.
Lori (25:38):
Ooh, that's tricky.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (25:39):
And now there's a little box in the, in
the, in the book, about that.
You can never say never inEnglish.
You can never say always inEnglish.
Never just doesn't work Then.
Or or I N, g, so they take thatbase, they can add the
inflections, then you cancompound it so you can make cook
top, cook book.
Or you can go the other way andI'm trying to think of a word
(26:01):
that has something cook on thefront.
Anyway, what you can do is,without making any spelling
changes, you're building kids'confidence in making big words.
You're showing them that oneword, that's a base, can become
lots of other words with otherbound morphemes.
That's an example.
I saw somebody doing a wordchain with kids around the O-W.
(26:25):
They were doing the O sound,grow, et cetera, and they, if
you are of the mindset that, hey, I could just show kids how
there are some morphemes in this, you could take that word chain
and add S right, or add I and Greally quickly and in the book.
(26:47):
What I essentially do is Iidentify, like, if you take a
typical phonics scope andsequence, I say okay, after
you've taught CVC words and thekids can really, really
automatically read them, you cando CVC words with S right away,
you don't have to wait.
Easy, add, light add.
After you've done words withconsonant clusters and digraphs,
(27:08):
you can take the E-D-I-N-G andE-R and put those on the end of
those words without any spellingchanges.
It doesn't work with ES, right,but you can do it, and so I've
just infused these.
I have this little chart here.
I get much more micro level inthe individual chapters where I
show you explicitly how to justlightly add in some big words.
(27:31):
A couple other quick kind oftips if you are in a k-5 school
and you want to think verticallyand talk to each other, you
could use a technique calledseek the parts you know spy, and
this one comes from.
I want to make sure I get itright.
I think this is the love itseries of studies.
(27:55):
But seek the parts you know isreally flexible because it's
simply what parts do you see?
So if you know a morpheme, youcan look for that.
If you know prefix, you canlook for that.
If you don't know a morphemebut you see a syllable type, you
can look for that, and it justtrains kids to look at words as
if they are parts, and that'spart of the problem right.
(28:16):
We're always on this soundedout thing, and really sounded
out only works for CBC words,cbcc words, right, it just
doesn't work for a lot of otherwords, and so that's another
thing.
Kind of one of the principles isthat all of word instruction is
build it up, take, you know,it's like you build it up, you
break.
It's like you build it up, youbreak it down.
(28:37):
You build it up, you break itdown.
That's kind of what you'redoing with kids.
So they come to a word likedesensitizing.
All right, how can we break itup?
We see an, I and G, we see D.
What do we see in the middle?
Here?
We see wow, three vowels, thatmust be three syllables.
Sen okay, I've gotClosedCellBalls, sendsit, okay,
(29:01):
and they can break it down.
So I mean that's kind of theoverarching, you know, kind of
idea.
The other thing I would say iswe have a lot of multilingual
learners, many of whom areSpanish.
Really, taking advantage ofcognates like información,
policia, immigration are anotherreally exciting way to to kind
(29:23):
of bring kids into theirLatinate roots of English and
and amplify your, your Spanishspeaking multilingual learners.
So there are lots of differenttechniques that you can use.
There are morpheme triangles.
You can take a word root andkind of explode it.
What are all the differentwords you can make with spect,
(29:45):
spectacle et cetera.
So I've got lists in the back,list of decodable compounds,
I've got word equations and kindof step, how do you go through
these things?
And you can use chat GPT.
A lot of times you can justenter in, you can say give me,
(30:06):
give me 10, you know, give me 10compound words with cat in them
.
And you can, you can have thoseright there.
Lori (30:20):
Never even thought of that .
Heidi Anne Mesmer (30:21):
Catnip, I'm your own chat GPT right here I
thought of one, Right, right,Well, I mean, sometimes it comes
up with things you're like notreally, but you know like
catapult.
Melissa (30:31):
I'm wondering about assessment just because I don't
think I've heard very much aboutassessing morphology, although
listening to you today it's likeit seems so important.
But do you have anyrecommendations for assessments
for morphology specifically orother?
Maybe assessments teachers arealready giving that could tell
them something about what theirstudents know about morphology?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (30:59):
about what their students know about
morphology.
Yeah, so I think because youknow, because it hasn't been a
big part of the K-5 dialogue, wehaven't seen a whole lot of
morphological assessments.
A lot of what you see aredecoding inventories which
assess kids' abilities to justpronounce the word right.
And it's important to rememberthat morphology is not just
(31:20):
decoding but understanding themeaningful unit in the word.
So you know, a decodinginventory doesn't completely get
at morphology.
There's a wonderful site thatGoodwin et al has put out there
called Monsters and it's awebsite that you can go to and
(31:42):
they have a real like.
It's a cool gamified approachto morphology assessment that
asks kids to do things like takea route and decide what
morphological part of the familywould go in a word.
So, for example, you might takea word like finance and it
(32:02):
might say the word, the sentencemight say something like he had
excellent blank skills.
That financial is the one thatwould go there.
That derived adjective or kids'abilities to take parts off and
be able to tell you what theymean.
(32:23):
You can use spelling inventories.
Spelling inventories also willoften capture.
Can kids make those spellingchanges with inflections?
Do they know, for example, likewhy don't we spell accident
A-K-S-U-D-U-N-D in T, right,well you know.
Or electricity, right, there'sthat base word, electric, and in
(32:49):
English we spell thingsvisually similar to the word
that they're related to, even ifthere's a shift in the spelling
, I mean in the sound you hear.
So, like in electric, the Cbecomes soft in certain words.
But you don't use an S, right,and a lot of times those changes
you'll see are really around avoiced or unvoiced variation of
(33:15):
consonant sound.
So, like the S at the end ofwords that can either be the
soft sound or the Z sound.
It actually, if you think aboutit from a pronunciation
standpoint, that S at the end ismore often going to say the
voiced Z sound, say the voiced zsound.
But we don't spell it that way,right?
(33:36):
Um, I kind of got off guard.
Anyway, the decodinginventories, the spelling
inventories and then the realtrue morphological assessments
are things that you can use.
I would say, with the decodinginventories and probably the
spelling inventories, I wouldreally love it if there were
more items, right, you know, alot of times you don't like, you
(34:00):
know you don't have items forall of the different ones, right
, it's just a sampling?
Melissa (34:05):
Yeah, it is All right.
So let's take a quick step backand think about why morphology
should be something teachersprioritize, and I, specifically,
am curious about what theresearch says about teaching
morphology and if you can sharea little bit of what the
research says.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (34:21):
Yeah, so what we know is that there is a
relationship between kids'comprehension and their
vocabulary knowledge as a resultof knowing the meaningful parts
of words, and so that allowsthem to really hang on to the
(34:48):
meanings of words and totransfer that and also to, as
they're reading and get older,to gather information about what
a word might mean based on itsmorphology.
So there's a number ofmeta-analyses that tell us that
(35:10):
that kids really benefit fromexplicit instruction in that,
that kids really benefit fromexplicit instruction in that and
that, depending on the outcome,it's usually vocabulary and
comprehension which would makesense, because morphology is
really the crossover betweendecoding and comprehension.
(35:31):
Right, it's, it's both things.
It's wrapped, it's it'sdecoding the word, but then
knowing how the parts of theword contribute to the meaning,
above and beyond the baseelement or the base word or the
root.
So it is both of those thingsand that's why kids really need
it and it's the thing that'sreally important too is that it
(35:54):
is the second layer, if you will, of our English system.
Yes, we're an alphabetic system,yes, there's a relationship
between visual symbols andsounds, but the next layer is
that those graphemes buildmorphemes, build words, and
(36:14):
we've kind of just in elementaryschool gone from grapheme,
phoneme word.
But there's this other part inthere and that is morpheme.
I don't even think a lot ofteachers even know what bound
morphemes are.
I mean, like they intuitivelyknow, right, Like you know, they
know the parts.
They might use the word suffixor prefix, but the class of kind
(36:39):
of word parts is is morphology.
And my, one of my big kind ofthings with this book is that's
just language teachers should becomfortable with and not
because they need to impresspeople or, like you know, I'm
not into this.
We've got to scientize thingsfor the sake of scientizing them
and making them legitimate andrigorous.
(37:00):
We just it's a, it's part ofthe system, right.
And the same way that you needto have some language to talk to
kids about categories ofgraphemes, you need to have that
with morphology and morphemes.
So I think it's reallyimportant that that becomes
something that teachers arefluent in, so because then they
can they can take off and do abetter job than anybody.
(37:23):
So it's we've just missed, likeit should be a pillar, Like
it's just like a huge omission.
I mean, I would not.
I don't think morphology isphonics, I don't think that's
accurate.
It's just this omission that,like people are not paying
attention to or what weren't,and we need it to be there and
(37:43):
we can have it be there in veryappropriate ways from the
beginning.
Lori (37:47):
Well, I'm so glad that you wrote a whole book about it for
the entire world.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (37:51):
Oh well, I'm.
I'm glad this is not acomprehensive book.
It's a kind of taste and if youare teaching, you know, in
middle school or secondaryschool you're going to need a
lot more detail there.
But I think in elementaryschool we can make it a lot
easier by building a big wordsmindset, by teaching kids how
(38:13):
these categories of meaningfulunits work, so that when the kid
gets to you know sixth grade,they know how the system works
and it's not just left to rightsounded out.
Lori (38:27):
Yeah, and I think previously, you know, it used to
be like kind of an implicitthing, like, oh well, obviously
they'll kind of like, I mean, orhere and there you would teach,
but not anything systematic.
At least for me and myexperience right, being in the
classroom like it was like, oh,they'll kind of figure out.
Like unlock means, like yousaid, like the opposite of
locked right, so the door'sunlocked, it's okay.
(38:49):
But I love the idea of havingstructure around this really
important piece and I think it'sa question that teachers ask a
whole lot.
I know Melissa and I talk aboutit a lot, we ask a lot of
questions about it and you'renot our first guest to talk
about it, but you're our firstguest to really kind of bring
(39:10):
this to K-5 so explicitly.
So we're really grateful to youfor that, thanks.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (39:18):
Yeah, and I think we can easily add it into
scope and sequence for phonicswithout disrupting anything.
It's very easy.
Add early on, very easy add.
And that's a big message too,because if you can't, if you
can't decode, like, say, youcome to the multi-morphemic word
delightedly, but you don't knowIGHT, you're not going to word
delightedly, but you don't knowI-G-H-T, you're not going to
decode delightedly if you don'tknow the base grapheme, the
(39:41):
graphemes in the base element.
So you have to do that right.
We're not talking aboutdisrupting that, but that's not
enough.
Lori (39:50):
You have to have more than that.
Would you want to leave ourlisteners with one last thing
about big words or teachingmulti-syllabic or
multi-morphemic words?
Heidi Anne Mesmer (40:02):
Now I'm getting really good at saying
that what I would say is ifyou're listening to this and
you're like morpheme,derivational, what?
Yeah, I don't want it.
If that's what you're thinking,the book is designed to make
those things very understandableand to lean very heavily on
(40:23):
graphics, very heavily ongraphics.
Tell me, teachers don't need toknow that.
So if you're a person who, whensomebody says morpheme, you go
what is she talking about?
Is she talking about the drug?
What does she mean?
Because it's a weird word.
(40:50):
Right, this is the book for you.
It's a first taste.
It is a first taste and itmight make you curious to really
really start going out thereand looking at a lot of other
really great resources.
We just can't let this go.
We can't.
Just it can't be implicit,absolutely not.
Lori (41:06):
So yeah, and the message I hear too is that we just can't
wait.
We cannot wait until upperelementary, you know, just till
fifth grade and sixth grade andon, to be teaching morphemes, or
you know, we can't, it's too.
Not that it's too late, it'sjust we're wasting time and
opportunity earlier.
Heidi Anne Mesmer (41:25):
Right, and it's kind of like that learning
to read, reading to learn, fakedivision.
Do you know what I mean?
It's the same thing.
It all sounds and I admit tobeing part and party to that
kind of division in this area itall sounded really useful and
then it doesn't make any sensebecause kids actually have to
read words that aremultisyllabic and multimorphemic
(41:46):
, almost immediately Simple ones, but they still have to do it.
Lori (41:51):
Well, we are so, so grateful that you took some time
to talk with us today, and wecan't wait for everyone to run
out and grab Big Words.
I'll read the full title againfor you it is Big Words for
Young Readers, teaching Kids inGrades K-5 to Decode and
Understand Words with MultipleSyllables and More Themes.
So it's available at theScholastic Teacher Store, on
(42:12):
Amazon, your local bookstore,wherever you buy books.
Heidi-ann, you're the best.
We love big words, thank you.
Melissa (42:18):
Take care To stay connected with us.
Sign up for our email list atliteracypodcastcom, Join our
Facebook group and follow us onInstagram and Twitter.
Lori (42:32):
If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share
with a teacher friend or leaveus a five-star rating and review
on Apple Podcasts.
Melissa (42:42):
Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions
expressed by the hosts andguests of the Melissa and Lori
Love Literacy Podcast are notnecessarily the opinions of
Great Minds PBC or its employees.
We appreciate you so much andwe're so glad you're here to
learn with us of Great Minds.
Lori (42:54):
PBC for its employees.
We appreciate you so much andwe're so glad you're here to
learn with us.
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