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Continue reading →: Chapter Eight: Grad School Update (I’m done!)Learning a new teaching position (Grade 5 in my case) while completing a master’s degree is no joke. In fact, I tried to drop this final capstone class two or three times! My professor (shout out to Dr. Jennifer Carlson at Hamline University) let me know I was closer to…
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Continue reading →: Chapter Seven: The wonderful ways humans get meaning into their wordsThis blog post has been waiting in the wings for a while, mostly completed but still in my drafts. Please forgive the long break between posts. Learning the ins and outs of a new grade level (5th grade after four years of middle school small-group literacy) has understandably been filling…
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Continue reading →: Chapter Six: Just a bunch of translations I put in a table because I’m a nerdAfter posting yesterday, I remembered something I had done back in July. This was firmly in my “can’t see the forest for the trees” stage of getting obsessed with grammar. The name of the blog, after all, is “What Makes a Word?” and I was fully invested in learning everything…
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Continue reading →: Chapter Five: What the heck is a word, anyway?Hey, wait a minute. Wasn’t this blog supposed to be a chronicle of your capstone project for a master of arts degree in literacy education? Seems like we’ve gotten off-track a bit with all this linguistics stuff. This isn’t a language blog. “Au contraire!” I would reply (to myself, apparently).…
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Continue reading →: Chapter Four: Is the past in front of the present? (Depends on your perspective.)A fascinating thing happened in my 5th grade class today and I would be remiss if I didn’t stop for a quick retelling. Our school uses the Louisiana Literacy FIRE (Foundational Instruction for Reading Excellence) program and Lesson 2 of Unit 1 is centered on the suffix “fore.” Suffixes? Roots?…
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Continue reading →: Chapter Three: Accidentally taught myself all about English grammarIt’s been a while since I checked in and I apologize for that. Summer school wrapped up in late July and then I got to enjoy a wonderful couple weeks of vacation with my fiancé and his family in Ocean City, Maryland – all the while, still reading articles and…
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Continue reading →: Chapter Two: How come you can be “joyful” but not “happy-ful”?The other day, I was going over the suffixes “-ful” and “-less” with my summer school students. “-ful,” is not difficult for them to grasp: “-ful” means, well, full of. If you are “joyful,” you are full of joy. Seems obvious. “-less” on the other hand is not so intuitive…
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Continue reading →: Chapter One: What Makes a Word?Welcome to the very first post of the “What Makes a Word” blog! My goal here is to document my journey through six months of research into understanding a bit about morphology with the ultimate goal of becoming a more knowledgeable, capable, and attentive teacher. Allow me to introduce myself.…
Welcome!
Let’s Learn How Words Work in Different Languages.
What does morphology look like in different languages and how can educators use this information to best teach their English Language Learners?
Hello, I’m Danna. Welcome to my blog! An educator based in St. Paul, Minnesota, I’ve been teaching since 2011 and have taught literacy skills since 2021.
I have been around for the rise and fall of Lucy Calkins (I still think the “Units of Study” are great for teaching certain reading skills – just now how to read) and I fell into literacy education around the time that the Science of Reading was beginning its renaissance.
I’ve been working on my Master of Arts in Literacy Education from Hamline University in St. Paul from 2023-2025. As part of my capstone project, I am exploring how morphology (the internal structure of words) functions in other languages. I want to know how insights into our students’ diverse home languages can help us improve our best practices for teaching English Language Learners.
In particular, I want to learn more about Somali and Hmong. These two languages represent the 2nd and 3rd most commonly spoken home languages of Minnesota students, but they receive far less attention and support than Spanish, a language much more closely related to English and often more familiar to English-speaking teachers.
Join me as I learn what makes a word work in English, Somali, Hmong, and maybe some other languages, too!
What Makes a Word? 