Discover how spelling works in only five minutes a week.

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...

One Step Now Education February 20, 2026 iridescent I was reading an excerpt from a book where the author described the "iridescent multi-colored sands." Although I knew the meaning of iridescent, I wondered about the word's structure. What is this word's base? Is it related to descent? If so, what is "descending" about the sands? We'll explore the many "colors" of this word first by looking at how images can help our students and how adjectives function. We'll then take a look at the...

One Step Now Education February 13, 2026 passionate For the Valentine's Day holiday, I thought passionate might be an interesting word to investigate. Could it be related to the free base pass? Get ready for a look at the derivational suffixes, especially the suffixes <-ate> and <-ion>. We'll explore the machinery of Latin verbs and their principal parts. In addition, we will touch on deponent verbs and Vulgar Latin. We'll also take yet another look at palatalization. Meaning What is this...

One Step Now Education February 6, 2026 semasiography When reading David Share's research article, Blueprint for a Universal Theory of Learning to Read: The Combinatorial Model, I came across the following sentence: "A non-linguistic semasiography that directly encodes conceptual meaning is a non-sequitur and exists only in very restricted communicative contexts, incapable of achieving the full expressive power of human language." Whew! There's a lot packed into that one sentence. If you wish...