School of Speech Ep 15
[00:00:00] Speaker: Welcome to the School of Speech podcast presented by SpeechTherapyPD. com. School of Speech is designed specifically for the school based SLP to come together to discuss current topics, tackle difficult situations, and share our insights. Our goal is to bolster confidence, celebrate our triumphs, and foster a community that's Dedicated to the excellence in the school setting.
[00:01:30] Carolyn Dolby: Hello and welcome everyone. My name is Carolyn Dolby and I am your SpeechTherapyPD. com podcast host for School of Speech. School of Speech is designed specifically for the school based clinician, for us all to come together to discuss current topics, tackle some difficult situations, and really just come and share our insights.
[00:01:50] Our goal is to bolster confidence, celebrate our triumphs, and foster a community dedicated to the excellence in the school setting. I'm excited for today's episode, Morphology Based Approaches to Improve Vocabulary Knowledge, Spelling, and Reading in the Classroom. We have Dr. Ginger Collins with us today as we discuss how school based clinicians can collaborate with classroom teachers To strengthen the upper elementary and secondary students literacy skills, emphasizing morphological knowledge, resulting in positive impacts in spelling, decoding and vocabulary knowledge.
[00:02:27] I need to start with some disclosures starting with Dr. Collins. She receives a salary from the university of Montana, and she is also receiving an honorarium from speechtherapypd. com for her participation today. Non financial Ginger is the. Founding member of the Structured World Inquiry Research Vanguard, and some of the interventions that she will include in this podcast today will include some of those approaches.
[00:02:53] For me, I receive a salary as the district level dysphagia support clinician for CyFair Independent School District. I am also compensated for my graduate courses I teach at the University of Houston, and I'm a consultant for school districts across the nation supporting Recording program development and staff training, and I receive compensation from speechtherapypd.com to host this podcast, Non-Financial.
[00:03:18] I'm a member of the Texas Speech and Hearing, feeding and Swallowing task force. I volunteer for Feeding Matters and I'm a member of Ash's Special Interest Groups 13 Swallowing and Swallowing Disorders, as well as SIG 16 School-based issues. I want to introduce Ginger. Dr. Collins is a professor and program director at the University of Montana.
[00:03:39] Her teaching and research focus on liter literacy interventions with morphology at the core. Dr. Collins also conducts research and teaches about post secondary transition planning and stuttering. Dr. Collins is a founding member of the Structured World Inquiry Research Vanguard. Structured World Inquiry is a method of investigating the spelling of words through examination of their morphological composition, etymology, and graphene foam neme correspondences.
[00:04:09] Wow. Mouthful, but hello, Dr. Collins. We're so glad you're here. 
[00:04:15] Ginger Collins: Oh, so glad to be here. 
[00:04:17] Carolyn Dolby: Yeah, so Ginger, let's get started. I'd love to know some of your background, your history. Where did you come from and how did we get here? 
[00:04:25] Ginger Collins: Sure I'm currently in Montana as you said, but I am originally from Louisiana and before I You know, went on to get my doctorate.
[00:04:36] I was working as a school based SLP. And particularly in middle school I really do enjoy those older kids. I think the younger ones are pretty stinking cute, but I, I really enjoy working with the upper elementary through high school, even young adult age groups. And I was working in a middle school, and one of the things I did notice quite a bit was that the students vocabulary knowledge was lacking, and it was just such a barrier to their accessing the curriculum.
[00:05:09] And I remember working closely with the middle school science teacher, 7th grade science teacher in particular. And. He came to me and I have to say kudos to the science teacher who recognized the language barrier that he came to me and said, Hey, I really noticed that my students are struggling. I teach him a word and we talk about it all day.
[00:05:30] And then the very next day, it's like, it just slipped through their fingers, you know, it just, they, they didn't remember what it meant. And he said, these kids are smart, but what's going on? And so I went in, I did a classroom observation, and he was absolutely right. That they were having difficulty retaining that vocabulary knowledge.
[00:05:49] So, we just got creative and we said, okay, we're going to create kind of similar to a word wall. We see those very frequently in the lower elementary grades. It's very common. You don't see them as often in middle school and high school, which I think is a shame because they're still really beneficial.
[00:06:07] But we didn't do whole words. We did what I would we called at the time word parts morphemes, but we weren't calling them that with the students, but you know, so we were talking about things like, you know, geology and hydro hydrology or something like that. And so we would break it down into those Latin and Greek roots.
[00:06:29] And we would describe the meaning and we had a board where we had all like a bulletin board where we had all of these words that were being commonly used in the lesson plans. And it was really fun after we did that. And we got the kids involved too. And they helped us create the board. So it wasn't just us, you know, kind of do it for them.
[00:06:47] They were part of it. And we just kind of did some observations of while he was teaching, we would see eyes glancing over quickly at the board and kids were very independently like, oh, what's that word again? And they didn't have to disrupt anything. They were still listening to what the teacher was saying.
[00:07:07] Just a quick glance over to the board, and he said it made all the difference in the world. And that's really what got me interested. And I felt very validated later when I did get into academia. I'm like, oh, yeah, there's really a lot of empirical evidence supporting this approach, which I didn't know at the time.
[00:07:23] But, you know, that's how we all do right when we're in the schools. Sometimes you've got to try something and see if it works. 
[00:07:29] Carolyn Dolby: Right. I mean, right there. That's part of the evidence based practices. Your your
[00:07:35] Ginger Collins: practice based evidence. 
[00:07:37] Carolyn Dolby: Yeah, exactly. That's fantastic. So why don't we get into more of I guess when you're looking at you started doing the smaller words but wouldn't it be easier for students to spell and read words if they were just spelled exactly how they were pronounced?
[00:07:52] Ginger Collins: Well, that's a common misconception, I would say. I think I hear that quite a bit. I see that on social media mainly because I touch on these things in my classes and then, you know, after my graduate students graduate, They friend me on Facebook or Instagram, and then they're constantly sending me these things.
[00:08:15] Like, you know, how crazy the English language is, and it's like, well, not really. So, there's a common misconception that spelling really should represent how words are pronounced. That spelling is supposed to be this one to one, Letter to sound or grapheme to phoneme relationship when spelling actually encompasses much more about a word than just its pronunciation.
[00:08:40] In fact, the primary function of spelling is to represent what words mean, rather than how they are pronounced. So, it's been really well established that it's much easier to read words that you understand, stand, rather than words that you don't. And how a word is spelled provides a lot of insight into its meaning.
[00:09:00] So if you can just imagine you know, let's say maybe not for somebody who is a skilled phonologist, but like for the average SLP, imagine reading a page of text. In English, and reading a page of text written entirely in the International Phonetic Alphabet. So, IPA gives us very clear indications of, of pronunciation, but the reader is given little or maybe no information about what those words mean.
[00:09:28] The spelling of that, the IPA doesn't provide that. And it's going to be a slog. It's gonna be really much more slow, much slower to read IPA Which is giving us all of that information about pronunciation, as opposed to just reading in typical English orthography. And this is particularly true with homophones.
[00:09:50] So, if you have a word like prince, 
[00:09:53] do you know if I'm talking about P R I N T S or P R I N C E? N I P A. 
[00:10:01] Carolyn Dolby: No. No. 
[00:10:02] Ginger Collins: No. Yeah. So, you know that the spelling tells us a lot about the word. Especially with the P R I N T S, we have a little additional morphological information. We know that it's plural as opposed to P R I N C E which is a single morpheme by itself.
[00:10:22] Our ability to read fluently is significantly disrupted without that ready access to the meanings of words. 
[00:10:30] Carolyn Dolby: Wow, you just, that was a huge eye opener for me, just using one example, using the IPA versus the written, the English written, that didn't, that was a big aha for me. Thank you so much. 
[00:10:44] Ginger Collins: Yeah, it's pretty interesting that some people can even read whole words faster than they can recite alphabet letters, because the words have a lot more meaning.
[00:10:53] Carolyn Dolby: Absolutely 
[00:10:55] Ginger Collins: reading a list of letters, as opposed to a list of real words, or, you know, reading in context is much faster than reading a list of words. Even when the list of words is. You know, less complex, simplistic words, 
[00:11:09] But they're devoid of meaning because they're isolated. They're not contextualized within a sentence or a paragraph.
[00:11:16] Carolyn Dolby: Wow, it's, yeah, it's amazing how, it's almost like we, when you're reading it in context, that you're chunking it. Absolutely. Yeah. Wow. I, I know that a lot of teachers and SLPs are often really uncertain on how to begin. Teaching, spelling, decoding, especially those irregular words often, you know, they, they, they're saying that these are the sight words that they just need to memorize.
[00:11:44] Do you have any suggestions on how to handle those irregular words? 
[00:11:48] Ginger Collins: Sure, but first I'd like to point out that the reason these words are often referred to as irregular is that they don't conform to the, and I'll say, so called spelling rules because these so called rules are most often based on what we observe most frequently.
[00:12:04] So, just this is I don't know how good of an analogy this is, but I'll give it a whack. Let's say if we see a wren, and we see a robin, and we see a woodpecker, and, you know, we see an owl, and you say, okay, these are all birds so birds have feathers and wings, and they fly, right? Well, then you see a penguin, and it's like, well, it's got wings, but it doesn't have feathers, and it doesn't, I don't think they have feathers anyway, I'm not a penguin expert, but I, you know, from pictures I've seen, they don't appear to have feathers, they don't fly.
[00:12:38] Emus, you know, are these large birds that they, they do have feathers, but they don't fly. So, you know, do we call those, well, those are irregular birds. Or is it because that's what we have, you know, imposed upon them? Like, this is, you know, since I've seen all these other birds, they all fly. They all have feathers, so that's what a bird is.
[00:13:00] Now, if you're going to come into this group, then you're going to be an irregular bird. Well, that's the way I think, you know, the birds and the words go together with this, because we instead of the birds and the bees, we have the birds and the words. So, we have words, and maybe you've seen something like the silent E it's like, okay, the E is silent.
[00:13:19] It's going to make that medial vowel say its own name. And that becomes a rule. And then you have words that it doesn't really work with, like love or come, and it's like, well, then those become irregular, but it's only irregular because of these imposed rules, not because that's an authentic rule that governs all of these words.
[00:13:40] So just that I think that's just worth pointing out. And hopefully my analogy wasn't too confusing or too convoluted. And hopefully that made sense. 
[00:13:49] Carolyn Dolby: No, I loved it. Version was like, tied it all together. I mean, because we don't call them irregular birds. Exactly. Right. There's still birds. 
[00:13:58] Ginger Collins: They don't have, you know, maybe a common as a feature as some of these other birds have in common, but but they're still birds so we can't impose this rule and say, well, all birds have feathers, all birds fly, except for these irregular birds, you know, and that's what we're doing with words, though.
[00:14:18] We're saying, you know, these are the rules and then we have these other ones that don't conform, so you just have to memorize those. However, I would say that you don't just have to memorize that because these so called rules are often just based on those observations about how most words are spelled with little or no attention paid to what those words mean.
[00:14:36] So getting to the meaning, that's where I would focus. I would say, let's go back to the meaning of that word. Let's go back to that word's history and investigate it a bit because that's going to give us a lot of clues. Because remember what I said earlier that Spelling is much more about meaning than it is about pronunciation.
[00:14:55] And so we need to attack or not. That's that sounds so aggressive. We need to really investigate the meaning. And so just as an example, a really common one the number two T. W. O. Right? So it doesn't really conform. This is one of those words that's frequently called an irregular word, a sight word, a heart word, whatever you want to call it.
[00:15:17] You just have to memorize it. So, you know, why is it called that? Well, we have the open syllable rule, where if, you know, the word ends in a single syllable, then I'm sorry, not a single syllable, in a, a single vowel at the end, it's not closed in by a consonant at the end, that the long O should be pronounced, such as in words like go and no and so.
[00:15:40] So, okay, that's a bit irregular. And. Also, we see that the, the W is in there, but we don't pronounce it. So it's a silent W. So, these two reasons kind of give it this category of irregularity. But a different way to look at this word, T W O, is to examine its history or its etymology. That's what we talk about whenever we're looking at the history of a word, where it comes from.
[00:16:03] So, the etymology, and I will say one quick tool that I, I think everyone should have in their toolbox. Is the online etymology dictionary. It's EtymOnline. They have a nice app, too. It's on the, like, first screen of my phone. I use it all the time. But anyway, because we never are going to know all of these words.
[00:16:25] And Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. So I think I'm going to go back to this example of TWO, the number two. So we were, you know, maybe we can look at these things. So the, oh, I we just know that over time you know, words Take on different pronunciation patterns. And this is a very old word.
[00:16:43] It's a number. So it got used frequently, early, and often. Mm-Hmm, . So, some of these spellings get fossilized, you know, from the past. And so, I. I don't have a good handle on its etymology to know why it's pronounced, you know, ooh, instead of, oh I just know that it's a really old word and probably somewhere down the road, you know, the pronunciation formed or shifted.
[00:17:07] But as far as this silent W. I think that's much more interesting because one thing I'm not sure that everyone's aware of is that a lot of words are spelled with these silent letters or these you know, what we might, might call irregular spellings. Those were deliberate decisions made by people who wrote dictionaries, people who had printing presses.
[00:17:30] Because they wanted to retain the history of the word. They wanted people to know where the word came from. So it's not a fluke. That was actually a decision made by somebody somewhere down the road. And two is one of those examples. But if you think about other words that are related, You know, to share an etymological root.
[00:17:53] We have words like twin. Twin has the W. And it means, you know, two babies born from the same womb. Twelve, you know, two and twelve make a lot more sense together. Whenever we have that W in there as opposed to not having the W. Twist. Combining two into one. That was kind of like the original meaning of that word.
[00:18:15] Twine, two threads twisted together, between twice. Twilight, even, shares a same, an etymological root with the number two. Because you've got light and dark, you know, in equal measure. So it's the two kind of competing there. Even the word twig. Or twill. They all have, share an etymological root.
[00:18:38] So twig is whenever you have a fork in a tree, so it comes off as like a little branch. So there's like two paths you could take on that tree. Twill is it literally means woven with double thread. So, but now that you know this, will you ever forget that number two? Not that I, You know, Carolyn, I'm sure you knew how to spell the number two, but would you ever 
[00:19:01] Carolyn Dolby: No, but I will never not think about the history of two and now all these words.
[00:19:09] They make so much more sense now. So then if somebody, if you've explained, okay, this is where I'm standing right now. Cause my, my mind's a little blown right now, honestly, Ginger. So, okay. Two with the T W meaning the number two double. Then if somebody heard the word, let's say twill for the first time and had never heard the word twill, I think this is where you're leading us to.
[00:19:35] You get the, you see the T W. As you do the two, and you start thinking, okay, it's double of something. 
[00:19:41] Ginger Collins: Mm hmm. 
[00:19:42] Carolyn Dolby: Am i, am I on the right path? 
[00:19:45] Ginger Collins: Absolutely and people, you know, I would say adults and children alike once we start going down this path of word inquiry and word study they just sort of do it automatically.
[00:19:56] They're not, they're not thinking about it anymore. They're, They're, I mean, they are thinking about it, but not consciously, that like, now it's like, oh, now I want to know why it's spelled this way. Now I want to know why that silent letter is in there. Oh, now I'm noticing that G in the word sign that didn't really make a lot of sense to me until I realized how it was related to signal.
[00:20:18] You know, which is pronounced. 
[00:20:22] Carolyn Dolby: My mind is being blown right now. I love this so much. I love it. And, you know, as speech paths, of course, we're wordsmiths. Of course we love this. And I mean, I know I'm geeking out right now. I'm sure everybody listening is geeking out because now how much, but you're bringing so much fun back into this rather than.
[00:20:45] Here's a group of let here's a group of words. Here's a list of words. I want you to go and memorize those you're giving the context. And I think what's also what I'm getting out of this is our brains want to see patterns.
[00:20:58] Ginger Collins: Right. Absolutely. 
[00:20:59] Carolyn Dolby: We, we are searching that out. We want to find the connection and yeah, forever changed.
[00:21:08] I love it. 
[00:21:09] Ginger Collins: Well, it's funny. One of my colleagues, Pete Bowers, he has this saying, and I hope I'm not butchering it, but I want to say he always says that nothing satisfies like understanding. 
[00:21:20] Carolyn Dolby: Oh, that's true. I mean, it's amazing. When you, when you understand where something came from, where it's and you, you share that now you can.
[00:21:32] Oh, I love that. That's true. Nothing, nothing satisfies more than understanding. That's beautiful. Yeah. All right. I know I might have gotten us off the tangent there. Let's get back on track. Where should we go next? 
[00:21:46] Ginger Collins: Okay, 
[00:21:47] Let's see I was looking through my notes here to see if there was anything that we should touch on.
[00:21:55] But I guess one of the things I would say that I know that we were going to be talking about upper elementary through high school, but honestly, we start working on this when kids are younger. As well you know, obviously, you have to scale it down or scale it up, depending on the age group, the ability level of the students with whom you're working.
[00:22:14] But kids are amazing. They're, they're really so intuitive. 1 of my other colleagues the other day was mentioning that and I think her daughter was. Either preschool aged or kindergarten aged. But she said something like, well, all these kids were included, but I was out-cluded. And so, you know, you know that no one ever taught her the word included, right?
[00:22:37] Mm-Hmm. . She never heard this before. And so that shows us that, you know, she at a very young age already has very good morphological awareness. She's aware of where the break in the word should happen.
[00:22:52] Carolyn Dolby: Mm-Hmm. 
[00:22:52] Yeah. I love that. That's right. I'm we oftentimes when a, when we hear a child do something, we think, oh, that's silly. That's cute. But in fact, it's really super intelligent. 
[00:23:03] Ginger Collins: It really is. It really shows just how smart they are. And they're taking those cues. And the ability to know where to know, that really shows that a lot of sophisticated language.
[00:23:17] Carolyn Dolby: Wow. Yeah. You're changing our way of thinking. I love this. 
[00:23:24] Ginger Collins: Oh, gosh. Well, and, you know, this, it's really well supported by the research too. I mean, there've been a couple of meta analyses about interventions that target morphological awareness and how that positively impacts certain areas. And it's like, we know.
[00:23:39] It definitely spelling. Spelling is a big one decoding, which is just the flip side of spelling. But also vocabulary knowledge. You know, kids are using their, their knowledge of the morphemes that are, you know, especially when we're talking about polymorphemic words, very complex words with Lots of parts.
[00:23:59] They may not know every morpheme in that word, but if they know some of them, that can kind of serve as a bootstrap to help understand the word. And to do this, I, you know, like when I'm working with my graduate students, for example, I have them make up words. And, you know, I, I show them that like other people can guess what the words mean.
[00:24:17] Now, the, the rules you know, there are rules on this. Like, we do have to start with some, some roots or some bases that are known to everybody and some affixes that are known to everybody. But one of the examples I use is micro heliology. So if you know, micro, 
[00:24:34] Carolyn Dolby: small, 
[00:24:35] Ginger Collins: we know helio, sun, and then that, that ology part.
[00:24:41] Carolyn Dolby: Oh, that small, small. sun-ology The study of... 
[00:24:48] Ginger Collins: the study of small suns. I mean, and it's not a real word, you know, but but you know, you can kind of create these and then they realize, Oh yeah, that's how we all learn words because to a child, you know, all the words are new, right? It doesn't really matter if it's a nonsense word or not.
[00:25:07] It's if it's unfamiliar to you, it's unfamiliar, and you have to use what you have to figure it out. 
[00:25:14] Carolyn Dolby: I know this is a blast from the past, but it kind of reminded, made me start thinking about the Pokemon cards. Sorry, but you know, and being able to figure out what, really, they have names like that. Right, right.
[00:25:28] It's a nonsense name, but breaking it down exactly, it makes sense. 
[00:25:32] Ginger Collins: Absolutely, and Harry Potter has quite a few. Yeah, to which I think is a nice segue. If you have a child who's at least interested in something like that, like Harry Potter, then you can really take off with that because they absolutely use a lot of these roots and bases.
[00:25:48] And, you know, speaking of roots and bases, I should maybe kind of talk a little bit about some of the terminology that we use whenever we're talking about interventions with morphology at the core. You know, and I think everybody on this podcast is probably pretty familiar with the word itself, morphology, but it is the study of word formation, like how words are formed, but not just how they're formed, but how they're broken down as well.
[00:26:12] So you want to know how they're, you know, you can compose them, but you also want to be able to segment and dissect them and break them down into their meaningful parts. And so there's meaningful parts. Those would be the morphemes. Morphemes are comprised of bases and roots and affixes. And that's where I think things get a little bit tricky, is that whenever we're looking at the language that's commonly used in school, so even in the Common Core State Standards we'll hear the word, the way the word root is used.
[00:26:41] Technically what we're really talking about is a base. So a base is a morpheme that conveys that primary meaning of the word in which it's embedded. Bases can be free bases or they can be bound bases. Free bases, exactly what they sound like. They can stand on their own, like the word house, tall, fly.
[00:27:00] Make perfect sense. Bound bases, however, must be attached to another base or an affix. And so, we get bound bases like J E C T. And the reason I'm spelling it out is that technically these words, these, sorry, these morphemes, don't have a pronunciation until they're attached. To something else.
[00:27:21] Carolyn Dolby: Mm-Hmm.
[00:27:22] Ginger Collins: And, and so technically we should be spelling those out. So JECT. Mm-Hmm. . So we see that in words like reject, project, inject, but you can't ject something, right? Same thing with like ceive like you can conceive, perceive, decieve... 
[00:27:38] Carolyn Dolby: Mmhmm. 
[00:27:38] Ginger Collins: But you can't ceive . So, those would be bound basis. Now a root on the other hand.
[00:27:46] You know, again, like, it gets used a lot in school language that that's what, you know, what I'm calling a base might be called a root in school language, but root is technically the historical origin of a base. 
[00:28:00] Carolyn Dolby: Okay, 
[00:28:01] Ginger Collins: and so that's where, you know, I just want to make people kind of aware of that, because depending on whatever resources, 
[00:28:09] I just wanted to make people aware of that because depending on the resources you're going to, the books you're reading, some of these terms might be used differently, and it's, you know, I'm not asking you to change all the things that you say in the classroom or anything like that, but you want to be sure that you're comparing apples to apples, oranges to oranges.
[00:28:30] And there are some terms that I'm not sure that are as familiar to everyone out there working with literacy, so if you can indulge me, I'd like to go over some. Would that be okay? Yes, please. Absolutely. So I think we're pretty familiar with inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes, if you're in the literacy world.
[00:28:49] But inflectional morphemes these are suffixes that when you add them to the base, they communicate just a little bit of grammatical information, such as past tense, E D, third person singular S, progressive I N G, those types of things. Derivational morphemes there are a lot more of these.
[00:29:07] These can be prefixes or suffixes. That when you add them to a word, they either change the grammatical category of the word, like the part of speech, so an example might be beauty, which is a noun, and if you add the suffix F U L to it, then you get beautiful similar in meaning, but it's a different part of speech, so that's definitely a derivative.
[00:29:29] Derivational transformation. Also you can have a change in meaning. So if I say something is legal, and then I add the IL prefix to it, illegal. Well, it's still an adjective, but it has a completely different meaning. It actually means the opposite now. So that's another example of a deriv derivational transformation.
[00:29:50] And then transformations can also be transparent, Or opaque. I also add in a little category of semi transparent in there. So with transparent transformations this is whenever there's no change to the spelling or the pronunciation of the base word following the addition of another morpheme. So I'll give an example of that.
[00:30:14] So let's say we have the word jump, J U M P, and we add the suffix E R, jumper. 
[00:30:21] Well, we still hear the word jump in jumper. Right? There's no pronunciation change. We can see J U M P in Jumper. So there's no change in spelling. So that's completely transparent. That one's pretty easy to, to see and hear.
[00:30:37] Freedom is another example. Free to freedom. F R E E is in freedom. We also hear free in freedom. So I'm gonna switch over now to some semi transparent transformations. And I call them that because there's It's either a change in the spelling or in the pronunciation of the base. And so an example here might be happy to happiness.
[00:31:03] So we don't hear a change in happiness. It still sounds like happy is in there and happiness, but there is a shift in the spelling because we toggle the Y to an I or, you know, yeah, we toggle the Y to I before we add the N E S S. Or magic to magician. One, the spelling is preserved, but there's a pretty big shift in the pronunciation.
[00:31:26] So we still see M A G I C in magician, but You know, there's a you know, yeah, big shift in the way it's pronounced. And then opaque, these are the hardest ones because there's a change in both spelling and pronunciation. And so, an example here would be deep, D E E P, to depth. So you've had, like, from long vowel to short vowel and also double E to single E.
[00:31:54] So that's a pretty significant shift. Three to third would be another one, five to fifth. Those are harder. Those are harder because you have a change in spelling and a change in pronunciation. And, oh, a couple more that I think would be really beneficial for anybody working in literacy to know, too.
[00:32:14] Is that have you ever heard the term twin root or associated roots? 
[00:32:21] Carolyn Dolby: No. 
[00:32:22] Ginger Collins: So these are these, these roots that actually have different spellings So if we remember that the root is that historical origin of the base, so I'm going to use the example of P. E. D. as in pedicure or pedestrian. And so that P. E. D. means foot, that's the origin of the word.
[00:32:43] But there is a twin, so P. O. D., so we have words like podiatrist. So, it just means that there is another way to represent that root, so P E D is one way, P O D is another way. We see this in other words like Q U E S and Q U I R are like question, quest inquiry. They all have the same meaning, but there are variations in the spelling.
[00:33:12] And so there's a, that's why there's a little bit of controversy about the word twinned root, because twin implies two, but sometimes there's more than two ways to spell it. So that's why we say sometimes associated roots. And just like the roots have variations, so do prefixes. So we have assimilated prefixes.
[00:33:31] Oh my goodness, this is something I really wish that, Teachers and SLPs in schools would just explicitly teach to students because I think this is so eye opening. And kids oftentimes will say, well, why did no one ever tell me this? This makes so much sense now. And I would tell them, I wish somebody had told me that when I was your age as well.
[00:33:52] But an assimilated prefix is a prefix that changes its spelling depending on the first letter of the base to which it is attached. And the example I'd like to use here is the prefix I N, meaning not, like, incapable or something like that, so not capable, in, I N. Well, that's the most common spelling of that prefix.
[00:34:16] However, whenever you're going to attach the I N prefix, meaning not, to words that begin with the letter R, like regular, do we say in regular? Huh. We don't. 
[00:34:29] Carolyn Dolby: No, we don't. No, I see where you're going now. 
[00:34:36] Ginger Collins: So now that N becomes assimilated. And so it becomes an R, because that's the first letter of the word regular.
[00:34:43] So it becomes irregular. It's not a different prefix though. It's just that the spelling has been altered. It gets assimilated into the word. 
[00:34:53] And more than likely, and I, I will tell you, I'm not a linguist, I'm not a language historian, but more than likely, somewhere along the line, it probably was I N, but because it is difficult to say in regular, it probably just got assimilated in our pronunciation to irregular.
[00:35:11] The same thing with words beginning with L. So if I say something is not logical, then it is 
[00:35:17] Carolyn Dolby: illogical. 
[00:35:19] Ginger Collins: Illogical. So that I L. No. The I N. 
[00:35:23] Carolyn Dolby: Yeah. 
[00:35:23] Ginger Collins: And then if I say words that begin with bilabial sounds, like probable, I don't say improbable, I say 
[00:35:33] Carolyn Dolby: Improbable. 
[00:35:34] Ginger Collins: Improbable. 
[00:35:34] Carolyn Dolby: Yes! 
[00:35:36] Ginger Collins: The bilabial. Or if something is mobile, and I say it's not mobile, it's...
[00:35:42] Carolyn Dolby: immobile.
[00:35:43] Ginger Collins: Immobile, right, because of the bilabial. So it's just, again, it just became easier to pronounce that way, so it became assimilated. So that's why we call those assimilated prefixes. However, had I known that myself when I was growing up, that would have been so helpful to know that that's just one prefix.
[00:36:01] You just spell it different ways.
[00:36:03] Carolyn Dolby: Right, right. So basically, this is what we as SLPs and teachers need, that we need to be using that strategy and teaching that, that exact strategy to our students. 
[00:36:16] Ginger Collins: Absolutely. 
[00:36:17] Carolyn Dolby: Yeah. 
[00:36:18] Ginger Collins: Yeah, and so, yeah, that's when, you know, people may ask me, you know, does breaking down words into morphemes really help students?
[00:36:26] Like, does it really help them with spelling? Does it really help them with, and it's like, yes, of course. I mean, to me, it seems so obvious, but I get it. I understand why, where some of the you know, Difficulty making that, that, you know, connecting those dots may be, but if you think about it as teaching a man to fish, you know, as far as like, well, when it comes to vocabulary words, there are just simply too many.
[00:36:47] I can't teach you every single vocabulary word. Nobody can. Nobody does. You know? We expect kids to, like, get a certain level of proficiency and then start doing some wide reading. That's where a lot of the vocabulary knowledge comes from, is from independent reading. 
[00:37:05] But if you have a Student who is struggling to read in the first place, then, you know, you're really heading down a bad path.
[00:37:12] And so I think teaching these building blocks of decoding, these building blocks of vocabulary words, and morphemes are just one of those building blocks. They're not the only ones, but They're important ones. And if you can teach them, like, okay, this is how we can break a word down. These are its components.
[00:37:29] These are what the word are made of. Then they can break them down and recombine them themselves. So that's why I'm saying, like, teach Amanda Fish, you know, you teach them these strategies, and then they start using these strategies independently. And so it's a good idea to start early and, and you know, that way that they have a certain level of independence going forward, or at least, you know, the knowledge that they can write these words down.
[00:37:54] Carolyn Dolby: Right. And that kind of brings kind of comes back to when you're saying and having that. Did you call it a morpheme wall? Yes. Yes. Absolutely. You know, being that, you know, especially for the, the upper elementary, well, more so actually the secondary student giving them that scaffolding. So they're not having to say, cause you know, sometimes if you don't.
[00:38:14] If you don't know, you just are like, I don't know it, but then they have somewhere to look, they don't have to be like, okay, I, I feel, I feel not smart right now because of the word, what that was just said. And so I'm not, but being able to be like, okay. I'm looking at that word wall now. I, I heard that I can now make that connection to what that word actually means now.
[00:38:35] Ginger Collins: Right? 
[00:38:36] Carolyn Dolby: Yeah. 
[00:38:36] Ginger Collins: And you know, I guess since you brought that up, it would be nice to kind of, you know, kind of talk about how this really applies across different curricular content areas. Because I don't think that gets enough air time. Yeah, I think a lot of people still think about literacy is being something you do in English language arts class, but, you know, it's important in science.
[00:39:02] It's important math. It's important in social studies. It's important in all of it. In fact, excuse me. I did a project a few years back with a third grade class. I've also done it with the fourth grade class at a local elementary school here. And what we did was we created a morpheme wall based on Latin and Greek roots that they were studying in their curriculum that year, and So I, we handed out index cards that each child had a Greek or Latin root on their card and just below it had kind of the meaning of the word and the children were to just draw a quick little symbol or something off to the side to give them like some quick recognition of what the word means or the, the morpheme means.
[00:39:51] So for example, T R I might be one, it means three so the child could either You know, write the number three or they could Draw a triangle, whatever, you know, helps them remember TRI means three. And so we put them up on the boards, and then the next part of the project was that we gave the teacher some cups to set on her desk, and in each cup were colored cardstock.
[00:40:18] So we had four different colors, and one was labeled science, one was labeled history, one was labeled I think English language arts, and then one was just other, and I don't remember which color we assigned to which now, but what we did was every day with the bell ringer, she would ask her students if anybody had any interesting words, did anybody find any words that contained those Latin or Greek roots.
[00:40:44] And so what they would do is, you know, and she would just do it for like two, three, sometimes five minutes at the beginning of class each day. So it wasn't a huge thing. And they would come up to her and say, okay, I found a word that I want to share and she would check it for him, make sure it indeed did follow that rule because as an example, one child found the word trigger and he's like, oh, it's got TRI.
[00:41:07] That's all that is not a route. So that what she would say, yeah, nice try, but, you know, no banana. Yeah. And you'll do that again. Anyway, but what they would do is, if they did indeed find a word, and they knew the meaning of the word, so they would write it down on that little piece of card stock, she'd give them a glue stick and they would glue it next to the morpheme. On the morpheme wall. 
[00:41:34] Carolyn Dolby: Okay. 
[00:41:35] Ginger Collins: And by the end of the school year, it was a glorious mess of just little sticky notes everywhere which made me very happy. But what was so great about that that is because it was color coded and they would ask them, where did you find this word? Was it in, you know, during science lesson?
[00:41:54] Was it while you were reading? Was it during math class? What was it? And what was interesting is, is the, these were very colorful morpheme walls at the end and it really helped them understand like oh, no, this is important in every content area It's not just about reading or writing and then they also saw that a lot of words, you know, yes you know the the number words like you and I or You know, poly or hexa or whatever, you know, like those were showing up a lot more in math class.
[00:42:25] But, you know, there were still like, think about how quickly they were learning those words and being able to just fluently participate in their math lessons because they knew the vocabulary associated with it. So anyway, so morpheme Walls, great, great for that. 
[00:42:42] Carolyn Dolby: Yeah, 
[00:42:44] and how fun and to, and so collaborative, you know, because you could get all the teachers involved with like almost like find the Easter egg, like the teachers involved of, you know, okay, here's a good word and somehow pepper that into your lesson and see if kids pick up on that.
[00:43:01] Ginger Collins: Absolutely. 
[00:43:03] Carolyn Dolby: That's fun. 
[00:43:03] Ginger Collins: Especially if you're giving them like little special things like in that particular class, that teacher was very strict. Students had to raise their hand to stand up and, you know, 
[00:43:13] so...
[00:43:13] but she made a special exception. If you found a good word, you just come right up and they loved that.
[00:43:19] Carolyn Dolby: Oh, my gosh. That's incentive right there. Great incentive. Yeah. And just, you know, children are full of wonder and giving them some guidance and, and, and. What do you, incentive to, to investigate, be a word investigator. 
[00:43:37] Ginger Collins: Yeah, it's so much more fun than just memorizing words and here's a word list.
[00:43:42] Memorize these words before we start reading. Nobody wants to do that. I don't want to do that. 
[00:43:47] Carolyn Dolby: No, no, but being a detective, I mean, it sounds so much more fun. 
[00:43:51] Ginger Collins: Right, it's a puzzle to figure out. 
[00:43:53] Carolyn Dolby: Yes. Yes, I think, yeah, we're, I love a good puzzle. 
[00:43:58] Ginger Collins: Yeah, who doesn't like Wordle? 
[00:44:00] Carolyn Dolby: Exactly, yeah. And then making just education itself fun.
[00:44:05] And I love that, that this is all tied directly to their education. And they're academics and, you know, and it's so relevant for them for what they're learning. They're learning the word because they're just immersed into it. 
[00:44:21] Ginger Collins: Right. 
[00:44:21] Carolyn Dolby: Fantastic. 
[00:44:23] Ginger Collins: And then once they learn to do it, it's pretty interesting.
[00:44:25] And even that. But the word wall, the morpheme wall I was just talking about in third grade, what was interesting to me anyway, was we had a break, spring break, and then this one child came back and he and his family had visited the Grand Canyon over the spring break, and he wrote down all these words in his little notebook that he took with him on vacation, brought them to school, and he was so excited that he learned the word hydrologist.
[00:44:54] And hydroelectric power and things like that was all from reading the little plaques at the Grand Canyon site and so he and he was so into it that he actually wrote them down, carried these words with him from his family vacation and was so excited to put them on the morpheme wall. So I think that speaks volumes.
[00:45:15] Carolyn Dolby: It does. It does. Because when, when the student knows that we're not just learning in the classroom, you're, you go out in the world and learn. It's all around you. Right. Be able to bring their world then back into the classroom. I bet all the kids wanted to, first of all, hear about the trip. Yes. As they're hearing about the trip, now they're learning the words.
[00:45:40] Or he's actually being able to teach the word he, you, when you teach it, you really know it, you know, you're giving that That power to the to the individual to that student, and I love that. Talk about generalization right there. Gosh. 
[00:45:56] Ginger Collins: Yeah, 
[00:45:57] well, speaking of which, there was another project I did. It was the same classroom, but a different year.
[00:46:04] Well, same same teacher, I guess I should say different different students, but still third grade. And we did something very similar. But instead of a morpheme wall, we gave each of the kids and more theme and. Based on a Latin or Greek root, and they were to create a, their own city. Based on that route, and they got so creative.
[00:46:28] It was amazing. I mean, it was just really, I think, telling people when I tell people about it, they would always say, really, this is third grade. That doesn't sound like third graders would have done. No, it's like, no, you, you give them the tools and they will run with it. They will absolutely do this independently because it is so fun and it taps into their creativity.
[00:46:49] It keeps them very motivated. But So one of the examples was C Y, I, I, I need to spell on paper instead of in my head, C Y C L O, so that's where we get words like cycle, cyclone, things like that. So that was one of the, The roots that the one of the kids got to pick and, and create their city. And so they created their city and I don't, Hmm, it was like Cyclo city, I think is what they called it.
[00:47:20] But it, they got really interested and they said, well, the city is not in a grid pattern, it's in a circle. Mm-Hmm. . So it looks like a bicycle spoke. And that's the way all the streets come to the center. They talked about how people ride bicycles everywhere. 'cause the cycle is part of. That was in the route.
[00:47:38] They are very green because they recycle everything. Everybody brings their own water bottles. The only bad thing about living in Cyclocity are the daily cyclones that happen. But you know, they got the talk about creativity. They knew that they had to use these words. And so, yes, first, that was the first part.
[00:47:58] Let's investigate. Let's find other words that are related, you know, part of that morphological family. And then once they made a list of those, we would incorporate it into their story. And then they also, you know, they, they kind of. Took the ball and ran with it. They came up with a lot of ideas that, you know, I didn't tell them to do that, but you know, each kid started, well, I wanna have a flag for my city.
[00:48:21] And so all the kids wanted a flag for their city. And then it had to be, you know, related to Mm-Hmm. their words. So they, they had a symbol or something, like a circle or a, you know, whatever it was. And and then they, each one had a mayor, and then the mayor had something to do with the word. And, you know, it just got, it just kept going and going, like they didn't want to stop, and then they created a little map of their city, and then every street name had something to do with the word.
[00:48:50] Wow. And, and these were not things I, you know, some of the things, yes, I prompted them, but a lot of them, they just came up with it on their own. It's like, once they got started, they didn't want to stop. They wanted to keep investigating. 
[00:49:02] Carolyn Dolby: It's so creative and, and you just. It's endless. The oper... it's endless on where you can go with this.
[00:49:14] Like, I'm sure all Those listening and me included are just going, Wow, give me more. What else can we do? There's so much. Talk about being invested in your own education. I love it. And I take it that collaborating with the teachers, they were an all go for that. 
[00:49:38] Ginger Collins: Yeah, you know, it's always, you know, it's always tricky in the beginning because you know, people are never really sure, like, why is this person wanting in my classroom and what's going on?
[00:49:47] Yeah. What are their motives? But once you kind of get a foot in the door and you realize that you're all working towards the common purpose You know, they see you as an asset, like this is somebody who is not only going to, you know, help, you know, spread the labor. It's not just me, but I'm also going to work with the kids that are probably the problem kids in the classroom, those kids who are struggling.
[00:50:12] So they stop paying attention. And if they stop paying attention, they're cutting up, you know, 
[00:50:17] Carolyn Dolby: right. They want to, they want to mask why that they're not paying attention because they don't want to say, I don't get it. 
[00:50:23] Ginger Collins: Right. Exactly. 
[00:50:25] Carolyn Dolby: Yeah. 
[00:50:26] Ginger Collins: And so, you know, and if you're coming in and you're saying, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna lend a helping hand and I'm going to take those kids that like, You know, you're, you're having the most problems with, you know, every day or, you know, the struggle you know, that, that really makes you a very attractive asset for the classroom.
[00:50:45] So, but yeah, and, and just keeping them abreast of what's going on to, you know, why you're doing what you're doing. And I was only there once a week. 
[00:50:55] So I wasn't even there very much, but, you know, I would always leave some things with the teacher. Like, if you want to keep this going, here are some things, but it's up to you.
[00:51:04] But that was one of the things in talking with teachers that I found is that sometimes you know, maybe they have a lesson that went, like, shorter. Then they had expected and they just have like this little extra time or you always have those kids who finish before everybody else, 
[00:51:18] Carolyn Dolby: right? 
[00:51:19] Ginger Collins: You know, you got to keep them occupied.
[00:51:21] It's like, well, here and we just leave a stack of things. You know, ways to keep those activities going in the classroom. And so if you have a random moment, if you need a time to have a bell ringer, or, or something to keep the kids occupied, then they have it. And I think that's another good way to kind of, you know, keep those collaborations fruitful.
[00:51:41] Carolyn Dolby: And for the speech path and those of us listening, thinking about, okay, so what would our goal be? We're going in, I know we're working with all the students, but we have our students in there that we're working on direct language with their, their goal of vocabulary. 
[00:51:58] Ginger Collins: Well, one of the things that I love about this is that you can work on one activity.
[00:52:03] It's great for group work. You can do active, you know, one activity, but one child may have a goal for spelling one child may have a goal for reading comprehension. 1 kid may have a goal for vocabulary, and 1 may have 1 for decoding or whatever, but you can still all work at the same time on 1 activity because it's benefiting all of those things anyway. 
[00:52:24] Carolyn Dolby: You're hitting all the targets instead. And I love that. I think as SLPs, we're, we're really all wanting to work, work smarter, you know, right. Being able to do an authentic activity that, Reaches all the students you want to, to reach and you're able to pull in different aspects and different targets for each student.
[00:52:48] Yet we're all working on the same goal rather than, you know, I guess singling out a student, 
[00:52:55] Ginger Collins: right? The way very piecemeal approach when, instead of a scatter shot 
[00:53:01] Carolyn Dolby: right? Right. And the students, it's almost like the students wouldn't even know they're learning. I mean, they're, you know, I mean, you know what I mean?
[00:53:09] They're being targeted for learning. Everyone's playing. 
[00:53:12] Ginger Collins: Yeah. And absolutely. And that's these classroom activities. Definitely we would have the, everybody, all the students in the whole class working on them, but I kind of grouped the kids who needed extra help and I would sit at their desk with them, their pod, whatever.
[00:53:27] And I would be there because, you know, You know, one, you're always going to have, like, at least two or three kids in the classroom, probably, who need, you know, who have an IEP. But then For every two or three kids who have an IEP, there's probably another five or six who don't have an IEP, but are struggling.
[00:53:44] And so, you know, it's really it really is a good prevention measure, too. So, you can kind of get in there, not only work with the kids who have a documented need, but those kids who are struggling, and if they don't get some help soon, they're going to be referred. And it's added to your already swelling caseload.
[00:54:04] Carolyn Dolby: Yeah, so let's get in there and get the and be working with the ones that we have on our caseload and be working. So the ones that aren't on our case. So don't get on our caseload. Absolutely. Yeah, right. I think we're all on board for that. Absolutely. You know, and and I think also being that this being speech pathologists, our scope.
[00:54:26] Of practice is knowing language and modeling that for some of the teachers and really showing what are why we are who we are and why we do what we do is because we do have extensive knowledge on this. We do have the training on this. We are the expert on this. And I think how we can benefit and what we actually do.
[00:54:47] Ginger Collins: Right. It's not just about our SNL. 
[00:54:50] Carolyn Dolby: No, right, right, exactly, exactly. We, we're and yeah, we're not a teacher. We, right, and shows how we kind of, can showcase. 
[00:55:01] Ginger Collins: We can compliment each others skills you know? 
[00:55:03] Carolyn Dolby: Yes. Yeah. Transdisciplinary. 
[00:55:06] Ginger Collins: Absolutely. 
[00:55:06] Carolyn Dolby: I like that. Right. 
[00:55:09] Ginger Collins: Yeah, I love going into the classroom.
[00:55:11] And, you know, not only is it great for me it's great for the kids, you know, because they're not missing valuable class times. I think it's just, you know, I mean, absolutely. There are times when you got to pull that kid out of the class. I get that. And I'm not saying that. You know, I'm opposed to that. I just think that we should be judicious and, you know, not pull kids out when we can work with them in the classroom because it just seems just so difficult.
[00:55:37] You know, if you have a kid who's already struggling and they're missing valuable lessons and things like that, and they're just, you know, falling even further behind really complicated. 
[00:55:47] Carolyn Dolby: Right. So, I mean, if you think about, like, why are we even here? What is our goal? Really? Our goal should be education, educational access.
[00:55:56] And are they accessing their education? If we're taking them from their education to be doing something isolated versus showing them, you know, a strategy in an authentic situation where 
[00:56:10] Ginger Collins: you learn this lesson that you're being taught right now 
[00:56:13] Carolyn Dolby: right now in real time in real time not have to be and it makes sense to them like if you taking a child out and saying okay we're going to learn I before E or whatever you're gonna say and then I before E and then they're gonna it means nothing when they go back to the class because now they're in You know, 
[00:56:32] Ginger Collins: and then they encounter the word beige and then they say explain that 
[00:56:37] Carolyn Dolby: Right I love that That's awesome.
[00:56:44] That is awesome Wow, is there anything that we I know that we've gone through quite a lot today. We did some terminology Really broke down how really teaching the, the meaning, the history that, that was an eye opener for me, especially with your analogy with the number two and how that came about.
[00:57:06] Ginger Collins: Yeah, I, you know, I did kind of want to go back to the vocabulary piece a little bit because one of the things that I found super interesting when I was just working on a recent manuscript, and I'm, I'm looking for the. I can't remember the exact name, but I know that Groves is the name of the researcher, and he's not an SLP by any stretch, but I think it's like more of an education researcher, but anyway he looked at science textbooks and he compared the number of words that students must learn in an introductory biology class.
[00:57:43] And we're talking introductory in, like, freshman in high school. Okay. And he found that it was like two to three to sometimes even four times as many words as a freshman college level foreign language class. Whoa. I'm going to let that sink in for a second because that's, you know, if you think about a foreign language class, especially at the college level, you would think, okay, well, every word, every word is new, right?
[00:58:07] Every word is a brand new word. But because of the way science words are, I mean, there are a lot of derivatives, you know, so. Absolutely. You're going to have bio, biosphere, bio, you know, that sort of thing. But, but when you're just doing a frequency count of the number of new words, but two to three to four times as many as a foreign language class.
[00:58:30] So that's a lot of vocabulary. It becomes extremely important that you know that vocabulary for science. It's important that you know, even if you don't know the vocabulary, but you have the strategies for learning the vocabulary. For like things like social studies, because there's so much independent reading involved in social studies, you have to do a lot of reading and that happens offline, you know, not during class time.
[00:58:54] So that's another important reason. And then also the, the even the vocabulary used in math classes, even simple nouns used in, math, not even the operators, but just like the nouns. Like if you think about the Greek roots and the Latin roots, which are not the same, well, sometimes they are the same and sometimes they're not the same, which can also make it more confusing, right?
[00:59:17] Deca here, but hepta here, you know, you know, why is it dy like dyad here, meaning two, but di over here, you know, Anyway, but you know, there's a lot of reasons that we need lots of vocabulary knowledge. I forgot what I was going to say. Oh, but yeah, but going back to those histories of words one of the examples I like to use for science is the word atom.
[00:59:40] So, Caroline, I'll ask you, do you know where the word atom comes from?
[00:59:44] Carolyn Dolby: I don't. 
[00:59:45] Ginger Collins: Okay. 
[00:59:46] Carolyn Dolby: I don't, no. 
[00:59:47] Ginger Collins: Well, okay. 
[00:59:48] It's actually comprised of two morphemes. So A meaning not and T O M meaning to cut. Oh, I think you had a light bulb moment there. I know those of you that are just 
[01:00:04] Carolyn Dolby: listening. I did. If you could have just seen my face.
[01:00:10] Light bulb went on. Oh, no. Together. 
[01:00:15] Ginger Collins: Yeah. So, because. Obviously, in the past, we didn't think, well, we it was before my time, but, you know, a scientist didn't think that they could cut an atom. That was like, okay, we got down to its, you know, most elemental state. You can't cut it. You can't divide it any further.
[01:00:31] So that's where the word comes from. It comes from not cut because they believed it could not be cut. Couldn't be split. And...
[01:00:38] Carolyn Dolby: we won't go into the splitting out. I think that's for another time. I want to leave on this aha that I've had many aha's with you today. You have I just you've really opened my eyes to actually want to.
[01:00:55] Dig deeper and be more authentic when I'm looking at how I'm addressing, how I'm attacking, approaching teaching and, and these goals for our language kiddos on our caseload. And I'm looking at because really, basically, let's bring it down to what is really needed vocabulary 
[01:01:16] Ginger Collins: vocabulary.
[01:01:17] Yeah. And then, you know, once you learn the meeting, the spelling comes along with it for the ride decoding, if you got the vocabulary, you're going to have like improved reading comprehension. I mean, there's just so many wonderful byproducts. 
[01:01:32] Carolyn Dolby: So, so let's let's we're gonna we're gonna slow walk me to this epiphany if I heard you right.
[01:01:37] We start with the meaning, which gives us the spelling. When we have the spelling, we can decode. Where did we go from there? There was another thing. 
[01:01:46] Ginger Collins: We're just saying, like, if you have the meaning, and you know the history, so it's not just the meaning, but I'm also saying the history. 
[01:01:52] Because the history is going to help.
[01:01:54] You know, with the spelling. 
[01:01:55] Carolyn Dolby: That's what it was. That's the missing piece. The history with the spelling. Right. 
[01:01:59] Ginger Collins: Right. 
[01:01:59] Because, you know, we know that certain letter combinations, certain graphemes, you know, are going to come from different historical origins. So, Like a word, like, that begins with a P N.
[01:02:11] Well, like pneumonia. Well, it's from Greek, you know. It's not, that's not a very common one, that's why I brought that one up, because it's kind of easy to identify. But, you know, that one, we're definitely going to say that comes from Greek. Or a C H being pronounced, you know, like a, like the K, that comes from Greek as well.
[01:02:32] And so the history is going to help drive the spelling 
[01:02:37] Carolyn Dolby: Mm hmm. 
[01:02:37] Ginger Collins: So we know that if we have a word like chromosome, so going back to my old word wall, morpheme wall science days. But that C H R, that we know that that's going to, you know, when we see that combination like that, we know it's going to be pronounced as a, like, similar to the K, 
[01:02:54] instead of C H R.
[01:02:55] Like the ch. Yeah. You don't say ch romosome. 
[01:03:00] Carolyn Dolby: No, we do not. 
[01:03:03] Ginger Collins: So that helps with the spelling, but also the decoding. And you know, and then once you have some good vocabulary knowledge and you're good at decoding, then yeah, we're going to have good reading comprehension as well and reading fluency.
[01:03:17] Carolyn Dolby: I love it. I love it. That just really, I just made my myself this little pathway of the, the meaning and the history, the history. Give us the spelling with that. We start understanding the spelling. Now, when we're reading a new word, we're starting to decode and then when we're able to do that, it increases our reading fluency and comprehension.
[01:03:38] Ginger Collins: Absolutely. 
[01:03:40] Carolyn Dolby: Wow. Yay. I feel like I'm an A today. Wow, Ginger, this has been amazing. This little journey, well, it's been a big, big deep journey, but it's been so fun. I, I'm, I've had several aha moments. I got to see it in my face. I came to life when I got that light bulb for me.
[01:04:04] Ginger Collins: Well, nothing satisfies like understanding.
[01:04:07] Carolyn Dolby: There you go. Oh, I love a full circle. Nothing. Satisfies like understanding. I love it. Unfortunately, I think we really, we're out of time. I want to keep going, but I can't. So I do hope that means that you might be open to coming back and joining us again. I'm talking about this again. We can definitely would love to have you back.
[01:04:28] Ginger Collins: Sure. 
[01:04:29] Carolyn Dolby: This has been wonderful. And I think everybody that's listening today, I hope you guys are taking away what I took away. Wow. Thanks, Ginger. Thank you for inviting me. Enjoy. Oh, my pleasure. Okay. Well, we'll have you back. All right. Thanks, everyone. Bye. 
[01:04:46] Ginger Collins: Goodbye. 
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