3 Simple Steps for Effective Word Study Instruction This School Year

Hey there, friend, welcome back to another episode of the podcast, and happy August. I always get so excited for August 1st, because to me, it feels like the start of the new year. I have spent my entire professional career in education, and so I always think of August 1st as the new year.

I sometimes forget that the rest of the world doesn’t think with a teacher brain or a teacher mind, and I frequently say things to my husband, like, oh, I can’t wait for this next year to begin, or I’m so excited for this upcoming year. When the new year begins, I’m going to whatever it is, and I’m talking about August, not January. So I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks or months telling my husband how excited I am for this new year.

And he’s like, but we’re still 6 months away from the new year. And I’m like, no, no, no, new school year, not the new year. So happy new school year.

I hope that this upcoming school year is going to be just absolutely amazing for you. I am super excited to continue to support and encourage you through this podcast in any way that I can.

And let me tell you, I have been like geeking out over word study. Word study is one of those things that I have done a lot of research on recently.

And I’ve realized that while I did quite a few things right when I was in the classroom, I had a lot of things that I could have learned and a lot of things that I could have done differently and been more effective. And I’m super excited to share some of just like the things that I’ve learned and discovered with you. I also realized that maybe I should have studied linguistics when I was in college or gotten a minor in it because it has just been so, I don’t know, I love learning about language and word history and origin and how things work together.

It has just been fascinating studying word study and language. So if you know nothing about word study or if it is not something that you get super excited about, my goal with this podcast over the next three weeks is to turn you into a bit of a word nerd, just like me. So that way we can kind of geek out over word study.

And then hopefully you feel really excited about this idea of being a little more intentional with your word study instruction this upcoming school year. So my goal with today’s episode is really to kind of lay a foundation of what word study is and share three things that you need to consider and plan for in order to have an effective word study block this upcoming school year, or in order to have effective word study instruction. First of all, let’s just take a minute to define what is word study.

Simply put, word study is the study of words. It really includes everything that students need to know when it comes to figuring out how words work. And so word study is really the process of learning everything and anything there is about words.

This could include spelling, it could include meaning, it could include pronunciation, historical origin, as well as the connection or even relationship to other words. And oftentimes, and this was my experience, especially when I first started teaching, oftentimes our word study instruction is maybe only gonna focus on one aspect of these elements in isolation without really connecting it to real world reading or writing. Let me explain two things here and see if you have an experience with this.

So have you ever taught spelling with a traditional spelling program where students get a list of words at the start of the week and I will admit that sometimes I had the bad habit of treating spelling as a set it and forget it type of thing. Like this means Monday, I give you your list of words, you go home and you study the words and then on Friday, I’m going to test you. I taught like that.

I’ve since learned that there are better ways to do spelling. Now, when I taught first grade and second grade, we were a little more hands on it, but I was hands off with spelling in fourth grade and of course now I regret it. But, you know, and maybe you’ll do some like word study activities or spelling activities during the week.

Maybe your students will rainbow write the words or do a sort with the words. But at the end of the week, you test them on the words. And when you give your spelling test, most of your students probably ace the spelling test.

They probably get 100% or maybe miss a word. But when you notice they’re writing, they’re not actually good spellers. And even some of the words that you have previously tested them on, they have not stuck with them.

So your students, while they have done well on the spelling test, they’re not actually good spellers. I had that a lot in my classroom. I had students that would ace the spelling test, they had an A in spelling, but they were horrible spellers. So if that is your experience with that, I’m sure there’s many of you that can relate.

And maybe you have also taught vocabulary with a traditional model where, again, you give students a list of words, maybe from your story of the week, and your students study the words, they practice the words. There’s maybe like a center activity for vocabulary. They’re matching the words to the definitions. They’re doing fill-in-the-blank activities. They’re doing word scrambles. And on Friday, they get a quiz. Maybe it’s a fill-in-the-blank quiz or a multiple choice quiz, and they ace their vocabulary quiz.

But sure enough, when you see those words again in another story or when they come in conversation, your students don’t actually know the meaning of these words. And this is how word study, I feel like, is often taught in upper elementary. And I feel like these methods don’t necessarily work.

They did not work for my students. And when I hear other teachers talking about it, they don’t work. And the problem is, is because so often, traditional word study is focusing on a short-term goal, which is for students to pass a weekly test.

And it’s not really the teacher’s fault. It’s the curriculum that we’re given or the resources or the expectation. We have to turn in a certain number of grades or all of that.

And when students are so focused on when we are focusing our instruction with the end goal of a test, we’re missing out on what the ultimate goal of word study is, and that is for students to become skilled readers. And so when we think of our word study instruction, we want to step away from this idea of, okay, we’re working towards the weekly vocabulary test, and we’re working towards the weekly spelling test. And instead, we are trying to provide intentional instruction that is going to help our students become skilled readers.

And so there’s really two parts of word study that we want to focus on and structure our word study block around. And that is giving our students tools that are gonna help them recognize the words. So making sure that our students have an understanding of letter sound correspondence, that they understand basic phonics rules, that they understand how the words work together, that they have a strong understanding of syllabication.

Then we also want to make sure that our students are being equipped with tools that are gonna help them understand the words that they’re reading, that they understand that words have meaning and that they can use word parts to help understand and predict the meaning of words. So this is where we wanna make sure that students are understanding prefixes, suffixes, root words, and how those impact the meaning of the words. And when we focus our word study instruction on making sure that students have the tools for both word recognition and word understanding, we are ultimately pushing them towards the end goal of word study, which is ultimately fluency.

Now, so often teachers assume or they associate fluency with speed and being able to read quickly. But really, fluency is the ability to automatically read words, phrases, and entire sections of text quickly, but also accurately and with understanding. And while speed is obviously one element, it is not the end goal.

Really, when we think of fluency, we should think of students really being efficient readers that can apply a variety of word recognition skills as well as comprehension skills at the same time. And so if we want our students to be fluent readers, they need to have the tools of word recognition as well as word understanding. And so when you think about word study, I want you to think about fluency as being the end goal.

Are we teaching our students in a way and equipping them in a way to where they’re becoming fluent readers? Not so much thinking about, okay, am I preparing them for the vocabulary test or the spelling test at the end of the week? Or am I giving them some sort of word study activity that fills up a center?

So really at the end of the day, when we think about word study, we really want to ask ourselves, is this helping my students become more fluent readers? Are my word study lessons helping my students become more fluent and really develop into skilled readers who understand what they read? Because that’s the goal of it.

Okay, so if that doesn’t necessarily help give you a little bit of motivation to work on word study this next year, let me explain a little bit why word study is so important in upper elementary. And then I’m gonna explain how you want to set up your word study instruction. Okay, one of the main reasons why word study I think is so important in upper elementary is that first of all, your students are gonna start to see an increase in multi-syllabic words, you know, even if you have students that come to you who were fluent and proficient readers in the primary grades, you might start to see them struggle in third, fourth or fifth grade when they start to see more big words.

And that is simply because that even if they have the foundation, they had really strong instruction in phonics, if they have not had the exposure to these multi-syllabic words and the support understanding how do they take these phonics rules and principles and apply them to the big words, they might struggle. But when you have effective word study instruction and you’re intentionally noticing words and becoming aware of words and talking about words, then you’re gonna be able to help your students navigate and apply what they know about word recognition to these bigger multi-syllabic words. And then your students are gonna feel a lot more confident in their ability to read big words.

So simply because your students are going to encounter multi-syllabic words is a really good reason why we need to focus on word study in upper elementary. But also if you think about it, word study helps both reading and writing. And this goes back to word study really is the study of all things related to words, the spelling, the understanding, the pronunciation, and all of those things are gonna help students with reading and writing.

If you teach your students the six different syllable types or seven if you wanna do final stable syllables in upper elementary, that’s gonna help give them the tools that are gonna help them understand how to break apart big words when they’re reading. But it also gives them a set of rules that they can apply when they’re writing big words. And so when you focus on word study aspects, it’s gonna have an impact on both students in their reading and their writing.

And then this next sort of reason why it’s so important really sort of highlights the importance of focusing on word meaning in upper elementary. But it is estimated that over 60% of English words have meanings that can be predicted from their word parts. And again, because we want our students to be skilled readers, they need to have an understanding of what it is that they are reading.

And if we can teach them word parts, prefixes, suffixes, and roots, and that’s gonna help students understand the meaning of the majority of the words that they read, it is just gonna make them feel so much more confident in reading texts and actually understanding what they are reading. So word study is super important. I hope hearing all of these things is just getting you really pumped up and excited for your word study instruction this next year.

So you’re thinking, great, I get it. Word study is important. I wanna do it with my students, but what should I do? What is my word study? What should my word study instruction look like? How do I actually put this in to practice?

And so when you are planning your word study block, there’s really three things that you should consider and plan for. And I’m gonna list them real quick and then I’m gonna break down each of the elements. So first of all, you wanna make sure that you are providing systematic and explicit whole group instruction. That’s the first thing. The second thing is you want to be intentionally planning opportunities for students to play with, manipulate and explore words, wordplay. And then the third thing is, is you want to make sure that you are providing opportunities for students to transfer their word study understanding to the texts that they are reading.

Because again, ultimately, the goal is not for them to pass a test at the end of the week or to do these skills in isolation. The goal is for them to actually become stronger readers and writers. And so we need to make sure that we are helping students with that transfer.

So those are the three things that you want to be intentional about planning during your word study block. And I’m gonna go ahead and take some time to break down each of those elements. Okay, we hear the phrase systematic and explicit instruction a lot, or at least I feel like I’ve heard that phrase a lot.

And so in case you’re wondering what exactly does that mean for our instruction to be systematic and explicit, I’m going to explain it. And systematic really refers to the order in which you teach the concepts. Ideally, you would have some sort of scope and sequence that you would be following for your instruction.

Keep in mind that just because you’re given a scope and sequence doesn’t always guarantee that it is systematic. But ultimately, you want to make sure that you are teaching your word study lessons in an order that makes sense for your students and that you are building upon the foundation that they already have. And so you’re wanting to teach things from least complex to more complex.

And so for example, let’s say that you are working on teaching your students all about different word parts and how word parts, the different word parts, have meaning and each part of a word can help us figure out the meaning of the whole word. And so rather than just jumping straight into introducing roots, which I know root word instruction is a huge part of upper elementary, but rather than jumping right into roots, which would be sort of like the most complex concept in word parts, you might start by introducing and explaining the idea of word parts by introducing compound words and helping students break apart words that are compound words into two parts, helping them identify the parts and the meaning and how that helps us inform the word part of each individual word, helps us figure out the meaning of the whole word. And then you might move into prefixes and talk about how sometimes there is a word part that shows up before the base and that word part can, you know, has a meaning and it can help us figure out the meaning of the word.

And then you might move into suffixes and then you might show your students examples of words that have both prefixes and suffixes. And, you know, we’re building on to all of this. And then you might jump into roots.

And you’d probably start with roots that students would be either most familiar with or see most frequently. So rather than just jumping straight into roots, which is ultimately what we want our students to really develop and strengthen their knowledge of in upper elementary, we’re gonna start with, you know, what they know and build on those concepts gradually. And this is the tricky part because honestly, in order for your instruction to be systematic, it needs to be based off of what your students know.

And that’s gonna vary depending on whether or not you’re a third grade teacher, a fourth grade teacher, a fifth grade teacher, what your students have had with words study instruction in previous grades. So just, you know, take some time. And a lot of this can happen through, you know, conversations, through observations, what you see your students talk about.

When you notice words and talk about words, do they have an understanding of syllables, of word parts? Do they already know some prefixes? Do they understand them?

So I think oftentimes we have this idea of like, oh my gosh, it has to be perfect. I have to start at the beginning and everything has to happen in complete order. Just take some time when you are looking at what you are planning on teaching for word study this year, or take a look at your standards and figure out, you know, what do my students have to know?

And then think about what order does it make sense for me to teach this? And simply, we want to make sure our instruction is systematic, which just means that we are teaching it in an order that makes sense and builds off of our students’ foundation that they already have. So systematic instruction, but then we also want to make sure that we provide explicit instruction.

Explicit refers to how you’re actually gonna teach your students. So whether you are teaching whole group or small group, when you’re teaching word study concepts, you want it to be explicit. So you’re gonna want to introduce concepts in either one at a time or in small groups.

You wanna make sure that you are defining terms and specific academic language. You wanna make sure that you are modeling these word study concepts using concrete examples. And you also want to make sure that you are communicating and teaching your students about any sort of exception.

You know, the English language is very fascinating. And so often we teach rules and patterns and our students learn them and they memorize them and they apply them. But pretty much whatever the rule is, there is going to be an exception. So we want to view these things more as generalizations. And we wanna give our students a little bit of a heads up. It’s like, hey, I’m teaching you this generalization. It’s gonna apply to most words, but you might see some words where it’s not gonna 100% apply or work depending on what the word is.

Let me give an example of what explicit instruction might look like. Let’s say that you are teaching your students all about prefixes and you are introducing maybe the most common prefixes first. One of the most common prefix is un. And so once your students understand that a prefix is a combination of letters that has meaning and you can attach it before a base, and when you do that, it’s going to change the meaning of the base. And so you would explain that the prefix un can mean not, or it can mean the opposite of, and then you would show them some examples.

If you add the word un to happy, you get unhappy. And you can explain to them that happy means, you know, feelings of joy. And the prefix un means not, or the opposite of. So when you put it in front of happy, you get having no feelings of joy or feeling sad. So you might break down a very specific example like that.

You might show them some other examples, uncut, unsure, unlikely, and with each of those, you can explain how the addition of the prefix impacts the meaning of the word. You might show them a sentence that has a word with un in it and talk about how that impacts the meaning of that word. But then you also might want to show students examples of where words begin with un, but it doesn’t operate as a prefix like the word uncle.

If you removed un from the word uncle, you’re left with just C-L-E, which is not a base word on its own. Or the word under, you know, U-N-D-E-R. If you remove un, we’re left with der, which is not a base on its own.

And so making sure students realize that not in every instance when a word begins with un, does that mean the prefix. Other things that you might want to think about when you’re teaching your lessons and trying to make them explicit are using visuals, things like anchor charts or slides to display your information. You know, showing students word lists of whatever the word study concept is, providing reference materials for them.

So that way after they’ve learned a concept, they can see, you know, whether again, it is a copy of the anchor chart for their journal or a reference sheet that they can come back to, but something then that they can take away after the lesson. But systematic is simply the order in which we teach things and then explicit is teaching them in a way that really provides as much information and examples as we can to our students. That is the very first thing that we should think of when we are planning our word study instruction is making sure that we’re providing explicit and systematic instruction.

And then the second thing is thinking about and being intentional about providing students with opportunities for word play. We wanna make our word study instruction very hands-on in order for students to really understand how the English language works. They need to have an opportunity to explore words, to build words, to manipulate words, to just play around with words and become familiar with it.

And this is really how they develop that strong understanding. And so once you’ve taught a concept, you know, whole group, or if you’re doing something in a small group and your students understand it, then you wanna give your students a chance to play with it. And there are a ton of different activities that you could do with your students for this word play portion of your word study block.

You could do building words, where students have word parts and they get to mix and match and put them together to build words. You could do word sorts, where depending on what you’re doing, you could have students sort words by their prefix or words that have a prefix and don’t, or words by the syllable type. You could have students do a word of the day or word of the week, where they look at a specific word and they apply everything they know to it and they break it apart.

You know, they look at the number of syllables, they figure out if there’s prefixes or suffixes, they use what they know to predict the meaning, they look it up in a dictionary, they use it in a sentence. I have several of those word of the day routines, both in the membership and in my TPT store, and teachers love using them because it is such a quick and easy way to reinforce so many of these word study concepts. We’ll definitely link to those in the show notes.

But even doing like a word web where you put, if you’re working on a specific root or prefix, you put that in the center and have students brainstorm other words that have the same root or the same prefix. Or you could do making words, where students are given, if you have a specific, like a key word, whether it’s like a holiday word or a big anchor word, and then students have to figure out how many different words that they can make from that main word. You could do word ladders.

Word ladders are a really fun way for students just to learn how to manipulate words. And a word ladder is simply a way visualize. It has a ladder, and you’re starting at the bottom and students have a word. You know, let’s say they’re starting with the word bake. And then you tell your students, okay, I want you to change the A, the long A in that word to I. And now all of a sudden that becomes bike. And now I want you to change the sound at the beginning, to L, and now it is “like”. And now I want you to change it to…whatever it is, but you keep on giving students clues to where every time they are changing or manipulating one part of the word to create a new word, and they work their way up the ladder.

So there’s so many different ways that you can have students explore and play with words, but ultimately you don’t want to just go straight from introducing the words through your explicit and systematic instruction, straight to the application. You want students to have an opportunity to practice and explore and play with words. And that’s really how they understand, when you’re teaching prefixes and suffixes, not every prefix can work with every base.

If you give your students a list of prefixes and a list of bases and ask them to make as many words as they can, they’re gonna realize, okay, pre, well, pre might go with pre-pay, pre-view, pre-read, pre-race, pre-write. All of these words can go with pre, but does it go with every word? Pre-talk, is that really a word?

And so just letting students explore how words are put together and how they work. So definitely when you are planning out your word study instruction, think about opportunities for students to explore words. And this is something that you can do every single day.

This is something that could be a part of your literacy centers. This could be part of your independent practice. So there’s lots of ways that you can incorporate this in there, but definitely plan for opportunities for students to explore words.

The third thing you want to keep in mind when you are thinking about your word study lessons are to help students transfer their word study understanding to the text that they are reading. Because again, ultimately we don’t want students who just have memorized a list of roots or understand all of the different syllable types or can easily spell words with a certain phonogram. Ultimately, we want students who are skilled readers and writers, and in order for that to happen, they need to be able to apply what they are learning during word study to their actual reading and writing.

This can honestly be done with any reading and writing experience. And so much of it is you just being really intentional about showing the connections between what you have taught during your word study lessons to what your students are actually reading. So you could do this during your read aloud.

And I always like to think about how, you know, small things can really add up over time. And hopefully you are doing a read aloud every single day. And if you just chose one opportunity during your read aloud, whether it is a picture book, a chapter book, you know, for fun, for a specific lesson, but if you just found one word that had an example of something that you’ve previously studied in your word study lesson, so maybe it has a prefix, maybe it has a root, maybe it’s a compound word, maybe it’s a homophone, you know, maybe it has a certain syllable type or a spelling pattern, whatever it is, if you just show your students that word and, you know, kind of model it, think loud, or show it to them and have them talk about it with each other, but show them how their understanding of word study concepts is helping them to read and understand that word in actual context.

And if you did just one word from your read aloud every single day, that would be 180 examples of you showing your students how word study skills help them grow as readers and writers. The same thing can be done anytime you are modeling something, you know, as far as writing underneath your document camera, or you have a student writing, you know, if you have a student who is showing something to the class that they wrote, find a word that they used again, and it doesn’t always have to be what you are immediately teaching them. It could be something that you taught them weeks ago or months ago, but just show examples of how, hey, remember when we talked about the prefix pre, and we see that example here in this word, or remember when we talked about the different syllable types and we see this word here, and there’s that example of the syllable type, whatever it is, just highlight it to the student so that way they’re constantly being reminded of, you know, the word study concepts that you have previously taught.

You can also do the same thing with other content areas. You know, if you have vocabulary that you’re teaching in math or science and social studies, think about how can you apply the word study skills that you are teaching to those other content areas. The same thing with small group.

You could start every single small group lesson with just one quick little review of a word study concept. And, you know, ultimately, by you just being really intentional and finding opportunities all throughout the day just to point students back to what you have been teaching and practicing during your word study lessons, they’re gonna start to see that it’s like, wait a minute, these things that we’re learning are not just meant to stay in the word study station of centers or in the word sort or whatever it is. They are meant to apply to our reading and writing and help us ultimately understand what it is that we are reading.

There is a quote from Wiley Blevins that I absolutely love. And he says, “If we want to create an environment where our students are word watchers, that doesn’t happen unless you intentionally create a classroom community that focuses on words”. And the thing that I think is so cool about word study is it does not have to take a long time.

It does not have to be the only thing that you are teaching your students during the day. But if you are just intentional about doing these three things on a regular basis, then you are going to be creating an environment where your students become word watchers. So when you are getting ready to plan your word study instruction this year, make sure you are thinking about how you’re going to systematically and explicit explain and teach your word study concepts.

Make sure you are intentionally planning and giving students opportunities for word play. And then don’t forget that ultimately we want to help students with that transfer so they can start to apply those word study concepts and skills to their actual reading. So I hope you found this episode helpful.

I hope you’re getting excited about word study this next year. Of course, if you want help implementing word study in your classroom, and if you want access to just a ton of different word study lesson plans and resources, we have them inside the Stellar Literacy Collective. You can definitely learn more about the membership by going to stellarteacher.com/join. We would love to have you as part of this community. I hope you have a wonderful week!