Many students find word study to be one of the most enjoyable components of balanced literacy instruction. Teachers find it to be one of the most powerful. That’s because reading ability dramatically improves as students use meaningful games and activities to discover:
Letters and the sounds they make
How to pick out root words, and how suffixes and prefixes can change the meaning
Spelling involves finding patterns
How to get clues to word meaning and pronunciation by examining the parts of a word.
But word study isn’t all fun and games. It actually involves problem solving in the form of developing hypotheses, searching for patterns, predicting outcomes, and experimenting to find out if they’re right. Using word study activities, students compare new words to words they already know and look for similarities.