Hey, Teacher! 👩‍🏫 Today I'm sharing some nerdy word information that I hope you'll find as fascinating as I do!

When I discovered that words are connected in more ways than we realize, it changed the way I taught spelling altogether.

Take a look at these two words:

sign​
​signal

At first glance, they don’t seem all that connected. And we use words like "exception" or "weird" to explain that silent letter.

But here’s the fascinating part...

Why does sign have a silent g?Because in other members of its word family, that g isn’t silent at all.

When we add the suffix -al, the pronunciation changes:

sign → signal

Suddenly, that silent letter has a purpose.

The spelling of sign isn’t random. It preserves its connection to the rest of its word family.

Once I understood that, I stopped looking at words as isolated vocabulary words to memorize. Instead, I started teaching them as families of related words that share both spelling and meaning.

And that’s when everything changed.

Instead of memorizing that sign is “one of those weird words with a silent g,” my students begin to see why the g is there in the first place.

The coolest, most amazing part?

You can keep building the family:

sign​
​signal​
​signature​
​design​
​designate​
​designation​
​assign​
​assignment

The spelling isn’t trying to trick us.

It’s preserving meaning.

That’s one of the reasons I love teaching morphology. It helps students see English as a system of meaningful patterns instead of a long list of exceptions.

When I share nerdy word info like this with fellow teachers, I am often asked how in the world I know this stuff. 🤣 I read. A LOT. One book that I read that I cannot recommend enough is Beneath the Surface of Words by Sue Hegland. This book CHANGED how I teach spelling and word study and I recommend it to any and every teacher!

Once you start seeing words this way, it’s impossible to go back.

I’d love to know—what’s an English word that has always made you wonder, “Why is it spelled that way?” Hit reply and let me know. It just might inspire the next edition of this series!

Thank you for being here!

Students absolutely LOVE these kinds of discoveries. There's something so exciting about realizing that words aren't random—they're connected.

If this little "aha!" moment made you smile, I've created classroom resources that help students uncover these kinds of connections every single week. They're designed to make morphology engaging, meaningful, and easy to implement so students begin looking for patterns everywhere they read.