I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how strange my spelling instruction must look to some of my students’ parents.

Because think about how most of us learned to spell. You got a list of 20 (probably random) words on Monday. You copied them a few times. Maybe you wrote each one in a sentence. Your mom quizzed you Thursday night. You took the test on Friday. And then Monday morning? Here came 20 brand-new words. 😂

So when I started the year telling my parents that their kids wouldn’t be bringing home a traditional spelling list to memorize each week, I knew there might be some questions.

And there have been a few. Not many at all — truly, I could probably count them on one hand (with fingers left over 😂) — but enough to make me realize something:

We’re asking parents to support a completely different approach to spelling than the one most of them experienced themselves.

In my classroom, I don’t want my students to memorize how to spell 20 specific words. I want them to understand why words are spelled the way they are.

Right now, we are looking at syllables. We are starting the foundation so that soon, we can look at spelling patterns, prefixes and suffixes, investigate bases. Before you know it, we will be talking about meaning. We will be building words, taking them apart, and making connections between words that belong to the same family.

Because if I teach a child to memorize sign, I’ve taught them one word.

But if we investigate sign and start connecting it to signal, signature, design, designate, and assignment?

Now we’re learning how English actually works. And that’s the part that can be difficult to communicate in a quick note home. One thing that has helped tremendously this year is the Home Connection I send home with each new concept we learn. It gives parents a quick explanation of what we’re learning, why we’re learning it, and a few ways they can reinforce it at home — without asking them to suddenly become spelling teachers themselves.

But I’ve decided I want to take it one step further.

In October, I’m hosting a Morphology Night for my parents. 🎉

And no, I am absolutely NOT planning to sit them down for an hour-long linguistics lecture. (Although I totally could. 😂 ) I want to show them what their kids are actually doing and answer questions like:

What is morphology?

Why are we breaking words into prefixes, suffixes, and bases?

What in the world is a word matrix?

Why are so many words pronounced differently but spelled similarly?

And most importantly:

Why aren’t we just giving kids a list of words to memorize anymore?

Because I don’t need my parents to become morphology experts. I just want them to understand enough of the why behind what we’re doing that they can feel confident supporting it at home.

And truthfully, I think that’s a piece of structured literacy we sometimes forget about.

We spend so much time learning better ways to teach kids — as we should. But when those methods look completely different from the way their parents were taught, maybe we need to teach the parents a little bit, too.

I’ll let you know how Morphology Night goes in October.

And if nobody shows up, I’ll be sitting there alone with my word matrices and snacks. 😂

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