Discover how spelling works in only five minutes a week.

One Step Now Education July 10, 2026 industry Years ago, I looked at this word with a student. It was just on the edge of their understanding so I didn't go into great detail about it. However, I believe there are a few things about the investigation that are worth learning. Before we begin, you might be surprised to find that what looks like a prefix or suffix may not actually be a prefix or suffix. We'll take a look at the features of nouns and the toggling suffixing convention. We'll...

One Step Now Education July 3, 2026 colonization As the States are headed into their Independence Day weekend, I began thinking about this word. A few months ago I was consulting with a teacher, and she was noticing connections to words from another morphological family that were interesting. I thought I'd investigate this word to share those connections with you. This word will come alive in more than just history books as we investigate its meaning, structure, relatives, and graphemes....

One Step Now Education June 26, 2026 emulate As with many words, I spotted the word emulate in something I was reading and started wondering, "What is the base in this word?" This is the kind of curiosity about words and their structures I'm trying to get my students to emulate. Get it? In this investigation, we'll learn more about verbs and sentence frames we can use to test for them. We will also look at the derivational suffix <-ate>. We'll review what a back-formation is as we learn to...

One Step Now Education June 19, 2026 congenial; congenital This is a pair of words I'm always having to sort out in my head like affect/effect. I know that sometimes knowing the structure of a word can help us understanding its meaning better, because the meaning of a word is suggested by the elements that compose the word. For example, consent is composed of a prefix <con-> that lends a sense of "with" to the base <sent>, "feel." So if you give your consent, you "feel with" that person; you...

One Step Now Education June 12, 2026 blatant Sometimes you hear a word quite a bit in everyday speech. It comes up over and over in different rooms with different crowds. I heard blatant for probably the fourth time in a short period of time on a podcast. I knew someone was saying somewhere, "Please investigate!" How much do you know about this word? Get ready to find out more about connotation and denotationalongside a syntactic test for adjectives. We'll sort out the difference between...

One Step Now Education June 5, 2026 cashaw No, it's not a nut. On Thursday, May 28th, 14-year-old Shrey Parikh correctly spelled this word to become the champion of the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee. But what is a cashaw? Not only will we find out why this word is spelled the way it is, we will take a look at indigenous languages and the words they bring to our lexicon. We'll learn how languages adopt and adapt words. We'll take a look at how some digraphs have place value, including the...