English Language Arts 2

Blending and breaking apart go in two directions with two jobs: blending is for reading a word off the page, and breaking a word apart is for writing one down.

You already slide /k/ /a/ /t/ together to read cat.

Three different moves make a new word: changing a sound, adding a sound, and taking one away, and a question about a word asks for one of the three.

Changing swaps one sound for another: sat becomes mat.

Longer words break apart the same way as short ones, just with more fingers: frost stretched slowly gives five sounds, /f/ /r/ /o/ /s/ /t/.

Say the word as slowly as you can and tap one finger for each sound you hear.

A change can be at the end or in the middle, not only at the front: hat becomes ham when the last sound changes, and ham becomes hum when the middle sound changes.

At the end: hat, ham, had, hag.

The words hardest to break apart are often the ones you know best: you have said “school” and “because” so many times that they come out as one lump.

A word you have only just met is easy to hear in pieces, because you are still listening to it carefully.

A digraph is two letters that make one sound: sh in ship, ch in chin, th in thin, and ph in phone, which says /f/.

The two letters of a digraph work as a team, and the sound they make is a new one, not the two letter sounds added together.

A word family is a group of words that end the same way in sound and in spelling, and Grade 2 families can be longer chunks: -ock in lock, -ight in night, -ing in ring.

Write the words one under another and the shared part lines up down the page.

A blend in print is two or three consonant letters whose sounds are all heard: in black you hear both /b/ and /l/, and in street you hear /s/, /t/ and /r/.

Blends and digraphs both put consonants side by side, but they are different.

A family grows when a blend goes in front: -ock gives lock, then clock, block and shock, with the ending untouched.

Keep the ending and try different starts, including blends and digraphs: -ing gives ring, sting, swing and thing; -ake gives cake, snake, flake and shake.

A word is read from left to right with each letter team as one piece: coach is c, oa, ch, three sounds from five letters.

Going left to right matters, because the order of the sounds is the word.

The base is the main part of a word, the part that holds its meaning: jumps, jumped and jumping all have the base jump.

Cover the ending and see what is left.

Some words are worth learning because they help you understand books and keep coming back: curious, ancient, gather and exhausted turn up in many stories.

Words like these are not everyday talk yet, so many readers your age do not know them, but a story can be hard to follow without them, and you will meet them again and again.

Nearly the same is not exactly the same: big and enormous both mean large, but enormous is much bigger than big.

Choosing between close words is what makes writing say what you mean.

The endings -s, -ed and -ing each do a different job to a base: walks, walked and walking say three different things about walk.

Walks tells what someone usually does: she walks to school.

Meeting a word in several sentences makes its meaning clearer, as when “gather the toys”, “gather around the fire” and “gather wood” all turn out to mean bring together.

One sentence gives you a clue to a word, and each new sentence adds another.

Letter teams are blended as whole pieces: a fluent reader sees oa, sh or igh and says its sound at once, so toast is read as t, oa, s, t.

When you know a letter team well, you do not stop to sound out its letters one at a time.

Pace is how fast you read, and a steady, comfortable pace is about the speed you talk: fast enough that a sentence holds together, slow enough that every word arrives whole.

Say a sentence the way you would say it to a friend, then read it that way.

Every reader misreads words sometimes, and catching your own is the skill: the reader who fixes their own mistakes reads well even when nobody is listening.

Even strong adult readers misread words.

Long words are blended quickly one syllable at a time: fan-tas-tic and bas-ket-ball are read part by part, then as one smooth word.

A long word is just a few short parts.

Phrasing groups words that belong together into meaningful chunks: “After lunch / we played tag / in the snow” is read in three groups.

Words that belong together make sense as a group: who did it, what they did, where and when.

A retelling starts with who and where: “There was a girl and her grandmother, on a farm by the river” sets up everything that happens next.

A listener cannot follow events until they know who the events happen to and where.

Asking and predicting are two different moves on one page: a question says what you want to know, and a prediction says what you think is coming.

Both happen while you read, and they do different jobs.

Each question word sends you to a different kind of information in a text: when sends you to time clues like “that night” or “in spring”, and where to place clues.

In a longer text, knowing what kind of answer you need tells you where to look.

A book read aloud can hold harder words and more information than a book you read alone: a read-aloud about volcanoes can teach you that hot melted rock under the ground is called magma.

Your ears can understand more than your eyes can read right now.

Chunking works for long words with several parts: understanding breaks into under, stand and ing, and each part is one you already know.

Look for small words, prefixes and endings, and letter teams inside the long word.

Listening and replying are two jobs that happen one after the other: while a friend explains how her bike broke, your reply waits until she has told you the chain snapped.

If you try to do both at once, the listening quietly stops, because both jobs need the same attention and the reply feels more urgent.

A whole sentence is for the listener, who may not have your question in their head: “I want the dinosaur book” works when “that one” would not.

A one-word answer works in your head because the question is still sitting there.

Ways of knowing are the many ways people come to know about themselves and the world: listening to Elders and family, watching and doing, spending time on the land, reading, and asking questions.

People learn in more than one way.

Listening shows in your body: sitting up, facing the speaker and a small nod tell the speaker you are following them.

Your posture and small gestures are messages too.

Clear and loud are two different things: a shout with the ends of the words missing is loud and still not understood.

Volume is about how far your voice travels.

A plan can be a quick web or list of what you will say: four ideas about your dog, her name, her looks, her trick and the cake she ate, are four sentences already.

Two minutes of listing saves ten minutes of staring at a blank page.

A paragraph is several sentences that are all about one topic: three sentences about your dog belong together, and one about your bike does not.

A paragraph is a group, and what makes it a group is its topic.

Creative thinking imagines and combines: a pencil that draws whatever you dream, or a story where a moose runs the school bake sale.

Imagination invents things that do not exist yet.

A research question works when someone could find out its answer: how many eggs a robin lays can be looked up, but why robins are sad cannot.

Questions that start with how many, what kind, where and what usually have answers in books, videos or from people who know.

Writing is clear when somebody else can read it, and you cannot test that yourself: a note that says “Meet at the swing” can look clear to you and read as “Meat at the sing” to a friend.

Hand your page to a classmate who reads it aloud.

A complete sentence needs two parts: who or what it is about, and what they do or are, so “the big dog” is only half a sentence until “barked” is added.

“The big dog” tells you there is a big dog, but nothing happens.

A pronoun takes the place of a noun so it does not have to be repeated: “Maya ran because she was late” uses she for Maya.

Without pronouns, writing gets clumsy: Maya ran because Maya was late and Maya's bus was gone.

The subject of a sentence is the person, place, thing, or animal that is doing or being something: in “The puppy chewed my shoe,” the subject is the puppy, which did the chewing.

The subject is usually a noun or a pronoun, and it often comes near the start of the sentence.

A word can be spelled in known pieces: to write stand, you write st and then the and you already know, rather than five separate letters.

Spelling a word letter by letter from its sounds is slow and goes wrong when the letters are not exactly the sounds.

Saying a long word slowly, one syllable at a time, finds every sound to spell: fan-tas-tic gives three parts to spell one after another.

Long words are easier in pieces.

Creators share messages for different purposes: to entertain, like a joke book; to help us learn, like a book about planets; and to give instructions, like a recipe.

Every message was made by someone for a reason.

A text feature is any part of a page that is not the running sentences: a title, a heading, a picture, a caption, a label, a chart or a bold word.

Open an information book and look at everything that is not a paragraph.

Many stories, real and imaginary, are organized in four parts: a beginning, a problem, a solution and an ending.

The beginning introduces who and where.

Poets use words and phrases in imaginative ways to create meaning: calling the moon “a silver coin in the sky” makes you see it in a new way.

A poem often says one thing is like another, or gives an object feelings, to help you see or feel it differently.

One message can have more than one purpose: a book about how to build a snow fort gives instructions, teaches facts about snow, and can be funny too.

Purposes can mix.