October??  Where did it go??

I started this blogpost well over a month ago but time ran away from me and I’m just getting back to finishing it.  However— time is not on my side any more today than it was a month ago, so it’s going to be short and sweet!

My 5th grade group studied the word <dyslexia> and took some action to raise awareness of this common learning disability during the month of October.  Along the way, we learned a lot more than just what Dyslexia means.

In the pictures below, you can see we found 2 Bound Base Words from this single word and a suffix:

<dys>  +  <lex>  +  <ia>  –>  dyslexia 

From there, we learned how to use dictionaries, Etymonline, the Word Searcher and Mini-Matrix Maker to find definitions, word origins, other related words and a grid forming program to make neatly typed versions of our posters.  We hung the posters in the hallway for the school to view.

Some of the best “take-aways” from this work was learning how to search our minds for relationships between words when using the Word Searcher.  The list of words that have <dys> or <lex> in them was lengthy–we had to ween the list down by finding words that held the same/similar meanings and ignoring the rest.  For example:  the words <duplex> and <flexible> came up in our search but they do not have anything to do with the bound base of <lex> which has to do with words, so we chopped our study list to about 1/8 its original size (oh yeah…..we used this to show fractions too!).

Here are the posters this group made: