1. Date and Reflection

I attended the Word Mapping SIM training at PATTAN Harrisburg on December 4-5,2018.

This strategy is intended to help older students (grade 6+) quickly learn how to predict the meaning of unknown words. 

Completed with Elizabeth Gibbs on Dec. 5, 2017 at Burns Middle School in Lawndale, NC
This reminded me of my morphology focus when teaching AIG students. My approach was to challenging and not organized compared to Word Mapping. This strategy is a systematic approach where students learn to identify prefixes, suffixes, and roots. This allows them to predict the meaning of unknown words. This will be an excellent strategy, especially in science. 

Completed Word Mapping with Elizabeth Gibbs on December 5, 2017 at Burns Middle School in Lawndale, This strategy reminds me of my focus on morphology when I was teaching gifted students. Other teachers felt that students who were not gifted were not "ready" for this. Had I known about this word mapping strategy, I could have been more influential in them seeing this differently. This enables students to learn how to predict unknown words because they are taught prefixes, suffixes, and roots. The can then use these skills to predict the meaning of words. I feel that this would be especially helpful for students in science.

The Word Mapping Strategy is especially useful for older students who need to quickly learn how to predict the meaning of unknown words.  For struggling learners, this strategy is important because they often do not have a large lexicon from which to retrieve words and they do not know how to identify parts of words that have meaning.  Implementation of this strategy includes five parts: a pre-test to determine students' skills, introducing morphemes and the strategy, practicing the strategy, determining progress with a post-test, and generalization.  The teacher is key in promoting success with this strategy during planning and preparation of the strategy and in bringing excitement and commitment to the teaching process.  This strategy supports the learning I am receiving around the science of reading in that it provides a way to teach the necessary skills in decoding word parts for meaning which lead to more fluency and better comprehension.

Strategy is designed to help students learn to predict the meanings of unknown words using word parts (prefixes, roots, suffixes). Two graphic devices are used: Word Mapping Strategy which uses the acronym MAPS (Map the word parts; Attach the meaning of each part; Predict the word's meaning; See if you're right!); Memory Table.