Classroom visual resources
a selection of classroom visual resources to support your word study
The Big Picture
- FREE – Word Inquiry Charts
- Word Inquiry Questions
- Word Inquiry Process Cards
Institutional Licenses are available for all of our classroom visual resources at heavily discounted rates.
Please email fiona@wordtorque.com directly to find out more information.
The Big Picture
FREE – Word Inquiry Charts
These free downloadable Word Inquiry charts are intended to support your word study with students.
The Three influences on English Orthography chart shows the interrelationship between phonology, morphology and etymology. The choice of letters used to spell words is influenced by the link with speech sounds, the need to show connections with other related words (the spelling of the base remains consistent), and the history of words.
The Word Inquiry Process chart outlines the steps we take to guide investigations into our orthography, noting the place of explicit teaching and practice. Involving students in questioning, hypothesizing and testing builds their critical thinking skills and allows them a routine they can apply beyond the classroom. There are more specific cards available for purchase that build on this anchor chart.
The Word Noticers and Word Knowers chart shows a cycle that supports our students in growing their knowledge of words along with their curiosity. As the teacher, a great starting place is to ‘notice and name’ something you see in words. For example you can think out-loud and say, “I notice that the /n/ in noticers is spelled with an <n> but the same sound in knowers is spelled with a <kn>. This models showing a curiosity about words. Depending on the age and stage of your word inquirers there will be concepts, knowledge and skills you want to dig into through tightly structured investigations. While investigations increase student engagement and build thinking skills it is important to make very clear to the students what they were guided to discover. As it is becoming increasingly apparent with the research on the science of learning, practice takes a greater role than previously thought. To consolidate learning, students need many opportunities for spaced retrieval practice. Why do all this? So students can apply their learning, and in turn also become word noticers and knowers.
Being a word knower encompasses way more than just being able to read and spell words. When you know about words you know many grapheme-phoneme connections, you know how words are built with morphemes and you know a range of affixes and bases; and you also know about the influence that history has on the spelling of words.
At wordtorque our goal is to nourish word noticers and cultivate word knowers!
Word Inquiry Questions
This set of downloadable Word Inquiry Question charts is intended to support your word study with students.
As we investigate words we have a set of questions we need to ask. The order in which you ask them can vary depending on your purpose, as can the emphasis you place on each. If your goal is a comprehensive study of a specific word and its family you will spend time with each question. Yet, if your goal is to study a particular affix or a set of graphemes, it will look a little different.
For example if you want to study when you use <ck> instead of <k> you will have a bank of words, but it’s important to tap into the meaning of them and determine their structure before looking into the letters and working out the orthographic convention around which grapheme to use when.
Each of the five questions is explained in detail along with suggestions for how to use them as you study words with your students. The icons I use to provide a quick reference are explained. There are 8 charts in this set, including examples showing their usage with the words play and revision.
Word Inquiry Process Cards
This set of downloadable Word Inquiry Process cards is intended to support your word study with students.
The Word Inquiry Process outlines the steps we move through to work out something about how words work. English orthography is not random and the structure of words can be investigated scientifically. The Word Inquiry Process is structured and develops critical thinking skills as students learn to analyze, synthesize and find relationships among words.
Investigations, big and small, start with a question, posed from an observation. These are usually teacher generated in line with the curriculum or a noticing of an area of study that would be pertinent for the students.
Of course, sometimes students notice something compelling about our orthography, and it can lead to a class or small group investigation. The teacher will guide the students to generate hypotheses and test data to draw conclusions. The process is often a little messy and will likely involve much going back and forth. It will absolutely include explicit teaching. At times this will be prior to a hypothesis being put forward, as the students don’t have enough background knowledge to even make a meaningful guess. At other times you will find you need to stop and take a side track to explain something that will allow students to continue investigating productively. It is vital that investigations finish with a very clear explanation of the orthography being studied, be it members of a word family, a group of affixes, a suffixing convention, or some orthographic phonology. Additionally we always want to be explicit about what this particular investigation teaches us about the system of how English words work. Intentional practice of concepts must form an integral part of the process in order to solidify skills.
The cards in this series can be printed as wall cards or a smaller size so you can make clear to your students each step of the process. Magnus, the magnificent magnifying glass, helps guide students through the process. His name comes directly from the Latin word magnus which has a sense of “great”. He is often called Mag for short. His sister Meg, whose name comes from the Greek megas, also meaning “great”, often steps in to help him out, but not in this set of cards.