Interactive Unit Guides

Why oh why does <y> have so many roles? Despite the fact that we teach our kindergarteners that "<y> says /y/", this is the least common role of the versatile<y>. Far more often, <y> functions as a vowel. Luckily, <y> isn't capricious and generally follows the rules below. Below is the interactive Unit Plan where you can links to lessons. Each blog post includes the typical grouping, methodology, suggested duration, and rationale. The PDF column will take you to directly

Good Things Come in Threes I suppose it's debatable if suffixing rules are "good", however I think it is good news that only three rules exist. Suffixing can seem overwhelming, as evidenced by the number of adults I've encountered that don't know when to double the final consonant, drop silent <e>, and change <y> to <I>. And there you have the three rules. Heads up that I do not teach any new morphemes this unit. The focus lies solely on memorizing and implementing the suffi

The Many Faces of VCe Vowel-Consonant-e, Silent e, Magic e, Bossy e...whatever you'd like to call the phonological patterns that indicates a long vowel sound caused by a single, silent final e. That's the focus of this unit. I teach this unit in conjunction with the three suffixing rules: Dropping Silent e, Change the y to i, and Double the Final Consonant. Below is the interactive Unit Plan where you can find tons of helpful links. Each blog post will include the typical

Our first suffixes of the year! At this point in the year, students learned parts of speech , homophones , and critical foundational terms . We are finally ready to learn some suffixes! This unit complements my -ed x3 phonology Unit . My data demonstrates that the majority of my students don't know the three pronunciations of -ed. As mentioned in my last Interactive Unit Guide , I think teaching suffixes according to their derivations, rather than their abstract defi

The -ed Files: A Mystery in Three Sounds The three pronunciations of -ed is, indeed, a mystery to the majority of my students. After students demonstrate mastery of the Unit 2: Short Vowels, I like to introduce the sounds of -ed. This unit is especially helpful for Emergent Multilingual Learners. I teach this unit alongside our Morphology Unit on Inflectional Suffixes to ensure that students know the meaning of -ed as well as the three possible pronunciations of /id/, /

A bicyle can't stand on its own because it's two-tired . Yay for corny homophone jokes.... that statement may be redundant. We have another outlier unit this year…in fact, I don’t teach any morphemes at all. Think of this unit as Foundations 2.0.  That’s because I’m not ready to introduce suffixes until students can define nouns, verbs, and adjectives/adverbs. Students typically bomb the parts-of-speech portion of my pre-assessments. Even if they recall that a noun is a “pe

Schwa: The Most Common Vowel Sound After students demonstrate mastery of the Foundations of Phonology, Unit 1, I'm ready to introduce...

Let's jump in! After analyzing the pre-assessment data, we’re ready to begin Unit 1: Foundations. This is  the time to go slow to go...

It's time to dive in! After analyzing the pre-assessment data, we’re ready to begin Unit 1: Foundations. This is the time to go slow to...