This is an amazing opportunity! Sue Hegland’s book is a deep dive into orthography, morphology and etymology. She did an incredible job explaining and exploring the complexities of English spelling. But this isn’t an easy topic and it helps, immensely, to dig into this book and discuss it with others, especially people who are experts in the field. 

Jennifer Petrich and her team at the Literacy Dr are providing that opportunity. They are hosting a Book Study of Beneath the Surface of Words starting on January 12th. This is a chance to dig into the core concepts of English Orthography with people who are true scholars in this field. For free!

Don’t miss this amazing opportunity.

This free presentation on January 16th, Implications of Variability in Morphological Instruction, examines how 4th and 5th graders recalled polymorphemic words under three conditions: affix-centric matrix, base-centric matrix, and a control list. They will be presenting their research and discussing implications for instruction. This sounds fascinating!

Thank you Kathleen Love for letting us know about this presentation. It’s exciting that research is (finally) being done on morphological instruction.

It’s hard for any of us to know when things we read, or see, on the internet are true, especially in the age of AI.

As we work to help our students build their background knowledge, or do research, we must also help them learn to think critically about their sources. It’s not enough just to tell our students not to use the AI Overview (because you can’t know if it’s accurate or correct), you have to help them find other reliable sources. To do that, we need to give them some tools for evaluating those sources. 

This article from Tech Learning provides one such tool. They use the acronym SIFT: Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims to their original context. 

That’s a lot of work, I know, but it’s something we all need to learn to do. So, as Pete likes to say about SWI, we can learn alongside our students. 😁

As most of you will have heard by now, the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) came out with a new definition of dyslexia in November of this year. 

If you haven’t had a chance to learn more about what has been revised and what are the implications of these changes, this free recording from EdWeb is a great place to start: Redefining Dyslexia: What Every Educator Should Know About the 2025 IDA Update.