Our Wildwood, Winter 2019, Volume 44

“English language is a highly ordered and consistent system that represents meaning. Unpacking that system not only helps younger kids to read and spell better but also helps older students deepen their understanding of the language and concepts written in the language.” —EMILY JOHNSON, DIRECTOR OF MIDDLE SCHOOL

“Pete’s approach is a great synthesis of what works best in literacy education, and that reflects Wildwood’s spirit of adopting what helps students learn best,” Emily says. “[His work shows], Emily adds, “that the English language is a highly ordered and consistent system that represents meaning. Unpacking that system not only helps younger kids to read and spell better but also helps older students deepen their understanding of the language and concepts written in the language.” This year, Emily spends a few hours each week back in a familiar setting—the classroom—teaching a class on SWI to all Wildwood 6th graders. For older students, the practice encourages intellectual inquiry, curiosity, self- discovery, and even playfulness into everyday learning.

Today, Emily and her students sit together on the floor in one of the Division One humanities rooms. With them on the whiteboard via Skype is Bowers himself. Emily reintroduces Bowers to the kids and shares with him that the students are interested in doing an inquiry into the word “equation”—a term they all know well from their math studies. “Well, there’s an interesting word!” Bowers declares to the class. He reminds students of the four questions they’ve learned to ask when doing a structured word inquiry:

1 What does the word mean/what do you think it means?

2 How is it built? What bases, prefixes, suffixes do you see?

3 What other related words can you think of?

4 What are the sounds within the word that matter?

After discussing the word’s meaning, Bowers helps students identify the component parts—beginning with the base and suffix. He reminds them of the role of morphemes—a linguistic term with a simple definition: a discrete component of a word that can’t be broken down further. (Think of them like the atoms that make up a word.) With this, Bowers helps the students use a tool to help them deepen their understanding—a word sum:

equation

equ + ate + ion

Focusing in, Bowers asks for some related words that also contain the “equ” morpheme. Kids rattle some off: equal, equality, equate. He throws out a couple of others—

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OWW WINTER 2019