A Graduation Word Study

Description

After a college graduation weekend, this word family was on my mind. Grades and graduating, are they related?  A Graduation Word Study will give you and your students a look at this word family.  Have you seen students misspell  graduate with a < dg >  or a < j > ? Let’s give them a way to remember the spelling, using this word study.

Talk about the meaning of this word. Look it up in a standard dictionary and an etymology dictionary like Etymonline.com.  Ask students to find the word parts (or morphemes) in graduate from the matrix.

Before you start with your students, take just a couple of minutes to work through the matrix using the instructions provided. You’ll model how to create word sums and apply the Final E suffixing convention.

As they write sentences with the members of this word family, they’ll become more familiar with the spelling and meanings of these words. Spelling and vocabulary building. You’ll find the various meanings of grade. There’s more than just A, B, C and first, second, and third grades.  Can grade be both a noun and a verb? How might we use gradual in a sentence?

A Graduation Word Study provides a simple start to showing students the structure, or morphology, of these words.

Your students will discover what may be an unexpected pronunciation for <d>. How many other words have a <d> representing a /dʒ/? That’s the International Phonetic Association’s symbol for the j-sound. Introducing students to this phoneme-grapheme (letter-sound) correspondence will help their spelling. How often do students try to use a <j> in this spelling because that’s just what they feel? Showing them other words with this spelling and pronunciation can improve this.

What’s included:

• <Grade> matrix on a ready-to-print word sum sheet
• Tips for preparing to teach and making the most of this word study