Looking forward to Week 3

Hope you are each enjoying a great three day weekend!  It comes at a great time for me.  Monday was a RARE evening for me to not have the technology support that I typically have.  I apolgoize for the lack of having a back up plan. I so appreciate your patience, support and participation in the activities.

Spelling out your names phonetically can be a bit more of a challenge than originally you might think.  Thanks for your great attitudes as you thought through the various sounds as to exactly which phoneme it would be.

Trading papers and seeing how others were thinking about morphemes also gave us the opportunity to reason out "how" and "why" would we break down words the way we do.  Remember to look for the smallest units of meaning.  Each part you break apart has to have meaning within it as it stands alone.  Here are some of the words from the exercise we didn't discuss in class:

1.  uneaten - 3 morphemes

• un - not
• eat - to consume or injest something
• en - derivative or part of making it a verb

2. gradually - 2 morphemes

• gradual - slow or deliberate
• ly - suffix used to show time
• This cannot be broken down to use grad as a morpheme because "ual" is not a unit that contains meaning.

3.  preregistration - 3 morphemes

• pre - before
• register - to record something
• ation - suffix making an action a noun "the act of"

4.  apologize - 2 morphemes

• apology - sorry
• ize - make into a noun

5. nationality - 3 morphemes

• nation - a country
• al - a suffix meaning of or pertaining to
• ity - a suffix to make a noun

We can see how phonemes are smallest units of sounds that certainly go together to form words.  We put these letters together in ways that create units of meaning, morphemes.  Once we have words we can then develop sentences.   

The key will be now to deepen your understanding of how the structure of sentences, the syntax and the meaning of them, the semantics, play a key role in the learning process for students with various exceptional learning needs.  How students use this language to interact with other children and adults through conversation demonstrates their pragmatic skills and abilities.  Often times chlidrens ability to interact with others can often impede their learning as well and need to be intentionally taught appropriate conversational or social skills in order to not just cope but succeed in the classroom setting.

Questions, comments and your feedback on this post is welcomed!!
Mrs. White