Download School-wide Terms for Word Study

School-wide Terms for Word Study
 The following terms are words or phrases students are familiar with from
Fundations in K-2. It would be beneficial to your students and yourself to use
these terms when revisiting Fundations concepts or teaching new word study
skills.
 The following definitions are the ones students are taught in Level 1 and/or Level
2 of Fundations.
 The example words/sounds are ones that students should be able to sound out in
reading or writing by the end of Level 2 Fundations. (Unless denoted with an *)
Consonant: a letter whose sound is made by stopping the air passing through your mouth.
Vowel: a letter whose sound is made by letting air continuously pass through your mouth.
Digraph: two consonants that come together to make a new sound. They cannot be
separated when dividing a word into syllables.
[Fundations Digraphs: sh, th, wh, ch, ck]
Blend: two or three (a group of consecutive consonants) when in a word you hear all the
sounds. Initial blends are at the beginning of a word and final blends are the end.
[Example Fundations Initial Blends: tr-, st-, bl-, dr-, sk-]
[Example Fundations Final Blends: -mp, -st, -sk, -nt, ]
Digraph Blend: consonant + digraph
[Example Digraph Blends: lunch, catch]
Glued Sounds: (also referred to as welded sounds in Wilson®) group of two or three
letters that work together to make a sound. Glued sounds consist of a vowel and one or
two consonants. Glued sounds do end with blends, but Fundations teaches those blends as
being attached to a vowel and contributing to the collective sound.
[Fundations Glued Sounds: ank/ang, ink/ing, onk/ong, unk/ung, am, an, all]
Bonus Letters: the letters f, l, s, and sometimes z are doubled when at the end of a closed
syllable word, following a short vowel sound.
[Example Words w/ BONUS LETTERS: kiss, hill, puff, buzz, hall]
Base word: the main part of a word, with all affixes removed. Fundations does not
consistently refer to base words as root words.
[Example Base Words: jumping, looked, pinkish, books, remove, deconstruct]
Suffix: letters or group of letters added to a base word that changes the meaning.
(Suffixes and prefixes are both referred to as affixes in linguistics but not Fundations.)
[Fundations Suffixes:
-s
-es
-ed (ed, d, t) -ing -est
-er
-ish
-able -en
-ive -y
-ful -ment -ness -less -ly
-ty]
Compound Words: words made up of two or more smaller words.
(Students are only taught single word compound words, those without a hyphen.)
[Example Compound words: bookbag, homework, rainbow, shoelace]
Syllable: a word or word part made by one push of breath.
(Students learn 6 syllable types and 2 exceptions. The six syllable names students should
be aware of are:
closed, open, vowel-consonant-silent e, r-controlled, vowel team, -le controlled.)
[Example words divided into syllables: o-pen, fan-tas-tic, mar-ble, pan-cake, ro-bot]
Vowel Team: vowel teams are two vowels that work together to make a new sound.
(Vowel teams can be divided into diphthongs and vowel digraphs but those two terms are
not referred to in Fundations.)
[Example words w/ Vowel Teams: team, boat, seed, coin, blew*, crayon, tailor]
(The letter w is treated as a vowel in Fundations when learning vowel teams.)
Homophone: words that have the same sound but different spellings and meanings.
[Example Homophones: main/mane, pale/pail, tow/toe]
Dictionary: a book that tells you the spelling of a word
(The Fundations dictionary in the level 2 student notebook does not give definitions of
words. This section of the notebook is used for spelling options. )
Keywords: words students can use to remember sounds. (Analogy words)