Discover how spelling works in only five minutes a week.

One Step Now Education April 3, 2026 charlatan The holiday of April Fool's Day may have started in 16th century France when King Charles IX changed New Year from Easter to January 1st. Therefore, if you continued to celebrate the new year in April, you were the "April Fool." "Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing"--Anton Chekhov You may find as you practice scientific word study that the more you go along the less you know. I've been at this for nearly ten years...

One Step Now Education March 27, 2026 covetous Sometimes I see a word that sets off my sensors, like a trap waiting to spring. I always caution looks can be deceiving. For example, in the PS of last week's investigation, we talked about hyphenating the word co-owner to avoid a double <o>. Is the <co> in this word the same prefix as in co-owner? Does the <vet> have a connection to veteran or veterinarian? These are the types of things early word studiers I've worked with spot. So let's test...

One Step Now Education March 20, 2026 self-deprecating Do you have a self-deprecating form of humor? I heard this word on a podcast the other day and wondered about the base of the word and a possible relationship to the word precious. I also think it's a good opportunity to talk about hyphens in spelling. As you read through this investigation, you'll encounter information about participles, both past and present. You'll find out how to handle Latin deponent verbs when you encounter them....

One Step Now Education March 13, 2026 battle It's Academy Awards time this Sunday, and the favorite to take home the Oscar for Best Picture is "One Battle After Another," starring Leonardo DiCaprio. I began wondering about the word battle. Where did it come from? What is its base? Could it be <bat>? Let's go on an investigation and find out. Before we begin, let's pause to look at our roadmap. We will discover things about nouns, verbs, and determiners. We'll take a look through history at...

One Step Now Education March 6, 2026 vigilance When you have been doing this work for a while, a word will come up in your reading and a flood of possible relatives surface one after another. Isn't this what we are hoping happens with our students? I want my students to see a word like affluent in their reading, and suddenly words like influence, fluid, and fluent pop into their head. We do this when we teach by family and not by arbitrary shared grapheme or phoneme features. When I saw...

One Step Now Education February 27, 2026 reticence In How to Winter, Dr. Kari Leibowitz's exploration into how the winter months affect our psychology, she explains that she has a "reticence to ride my bike instead of my car." The word reticence is one I'm quite familiar with, but I'm not familiar with its structure. Could it be related to reticular? Let's find out. Explore why we put the elements in words in angle brackets. We'll look at how nouns can be confusing when looking at lists of...