Recording of Dr. Peter Bowers: Showing PreK - Grade 2 Students How Spoken and Written Words Really Work Webinar

This is a per person fee for those who intend to watch these recordings that will be available for three month.  After purchasing, you will receive an email with the subject line "your downloads are ready." This contains a PDF with the links to your recordings.

If we want to ensure that our youngest students will develop the critical early literacy skills needed for success, we want to make sure that they gain a solid understanding of letter and sound awareness. 

Beginning literacy instruction needs to draw explicit attention to how the spellings of words link to the pronunciations of those words. Bring meaning into the mix, and you've hit a home run! This process involves explicit instruction regarding:

1. What the graphemes are (single letters, digraphs, or trigraphs) 
2. Which phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters) can be linked together
3. Ways to remember which graphemes are needed to spell a specific word

Recognizing the importance of the work of Dr. Peter Bowers, Louisa Moats, one of the premiere experts in the field of literacy, invited him to film a presentation on Structured Word Inquiry that is now required study for LETRs trainers. All research-based early literacy instruction we know of specifically targets the first two points above. Unfortunately, guidance for point #3 above is rarely provided. How often do you find your struggling students asking things like, "How am I supposed to remember which letters to use in this word? Should I spell it this way, or that way?” You may be hearing these questions regarding words like "two," "to," and "too.” In addition, many research-based resources describe words like “does,” “been,” “says,” or “one” as “exceptions” that have to be memorized. Of course those with poor phonological awareness and weak orthographic memories suffer the most with this situation. Most students learn to read and write these abstract words without having to understand them. Wouldn’t it be amazing if there were systematic meaning cues to explain the grapheme-phoneme correspondences in those words? 

This workshop introduces teachers, clinicians, tutors and parents to how we can understand that we already have that “amazing” system, but we just have to be taught how it works. Structured Word Inquiry (Bowers & Kirby, 2010) is an engaging instruction approach that builds literacy by guiding children in how to study that system through active and visual scientific inquiry activities. In this session, Dr. Bowers helps participants learn new concepts about how our writing system works by using the same effective activities that are used with teachers in pre-school to Grade 2 around the world. 

See this TEDx Talk (18 min) by Dr. Bowers to get a better sense of this understanding of English spelling, Don't miss this exciting event!

PRESENTER BIO:

Peter Bowers, Ph.D., is a researcher, author, educator and founder of
WordWorks Literacy Centre. His vocabulary intervention (Bowers & Kirby,
2010) introduced the phrase, “structured word inquiry.” That study with grade
four and five students found generative vocabulary learning for the SWI
condition over controls. He has published widely on SWI and the effects of
morphology instruction. Counter to typical assumptions, younger and less able
students gain the most from including morphology in literacy instruction.
Further the greatest effects of morphological instruction are for phonological
gains. Recognizing the importance of the work of Dr. Peter Bowers, Louisa Moats invited him to film a presentation on SWI that is now required study for LETRs trainers.  Bowers has been invited to present Keynote addresses at major literacy
conferences in North America (e.g. IDA and ASHA) the UK (PATOSS) and
Australia (ALEA) and has worked with educators and students in schools
around the world for over a decade. Bowers work seeks to illuminate the best
evidence of research and practice for educators and researchers