Happy New Year to everyone! Wishing you a Happy and Healthy 2022.
I am ready to start the New Year and am welcoming new ideas and strategies to help teach and support children, especially with their reading and spelling. Over the holidays I came across the following video regarding stressed syllables. The Kelly and Phillips Conquering Literacy intervention programme I follow has a teaching point for stressed/accented syllables. I find this really difficult to teach and the students find it tricky to understand. Therefore, I was really grateful to come across the video which gives some great strategies to explain how we stress one syllable of the word and how it can change the meaning e.g. think of the sentence ‘I object that the object should be placed there.’ I haven’t used the strategy in the video yet, but I really think it will help the students understand.
I was surprised the other week to discover that many children of different ages had difficulty spelling the words ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ although these words are among the year 2 common exception words. Then a colleague pointed out that children hardly ever write letters to others these days and so rarely have the need to write these titles. It made me think further that actually not so many years ago all adults were known to children by their full title of ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ but nowadays children tend to call friends of their parents by their first name. and it only tends to be teachers who still keep their title. Ok, this all makes me sound and feel really old! I then wondered if the younger generation realise how the words Mr and Mrs were derived? Most probably do know, but I explain this when I teach spelling and reading the tricky words ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ as described below.
When explaining how to read and spell the words Mr and Mrs, I refer the students to days gone by, when the lady of the house was called the Mistress. I write the word ‘Mistress’ on the board and then begin rubbing out letters until only the M r and s are left showing. I explain that the word Mistress was a long word to have to keep writing out, so it was abbreviated to the three letters Mrs and over time the pronounciation was changed from Mistress to ‘Missus’ to refer to a married lady and is followed by the lady’s surname. The same applies to the word Mr as it used to represent the word ‘Master’ to apply to the Master of the house. Therefore I write the word ‘Master’ on the board and remove all the letters except the M and r. I explain that eventually it was abbreviated to ‘Mr’ and gradually it was changed to be pronounced as ‘Mister’. I add that because these words are always part of somebody’s name, they always begin with a capital letter.
Don’t forget SEND Station for short, cheap training sessions on a variety of subjects. More details on https://www.sendstation.co.uk.
I hope 2022 is good to you all. PJ 🙂
Help your child learn to read, write and spell 