IPA Word of the Day

I have really liked using the new High Frequency Word (aka sight words) curriculum by Fiona Hamilton and Rebecca Loveless with my younger class this year! We did Study Booklet #1. Next year we will do the other four booklets in the series. We started late because I didn't want them to have a Word Study block until midway through the 2nd grade year. There is plenty of literacy instruction already happening with the Waldorf method of learning to read via bookmaking. After all, writing came before reading!

The older children learned about the history of the English language, and we had a Linguistics special guest come, Dr. Jeffrey Punske. He went over the Great Vowel Shift and the International Phonetic Alphabet. The older children were fascinated by IPA and wanted to learn more. Luckly, The hfw Project includes learning about IPA as part of the activities for each word! So I just put an IPA Word of the Day up on the board under the date, and each morning at our Morning Meeting they tried to figure out what it said. We learned about the history of the word (etymology is also included in the curriculum) and the younger children then practiced tap-spelling it to get muscle memory for how the word is built and how to correctly spell it.

Study Booklet #1 includes the following words: a, I, the, that, and, to, on, in, he, she, it, you, they, my, by, but, is, was, for, have, of, with.

Now that we have finished up Study Booklet #1 with < with > on Thursday, the older children have asked that I put up more difficult IPA words for them to figure out each morning. So I'm going to use https://www.dictionary.com because they not only have a Word of the Day, but there's a little button you can click next to the pronunciation that says "show IPA."

Today, for example, the Word of the Day is retrograde.

/ ˈrɛ trəˌgreɪd /

By the way, if you need to write in IPA and your computer keyboard is objecting, a useful website is https://ipa.typeit.org. The description states, "This page allows you to easily type phonetic transcriptions of English words in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). You can edit your text in the box and then copy it to your document, e-mail message, etc."

I'll update the list of words as we do them together and round out the year:

May 1 - fioritura  / fiˌɔr ɪˈtʊər ə /

May 2 - mauka  / mɑˈu kə /

May 3 - nearlywed  / ˈnɪər liˌwɛd /

May 8 - lilapsophobia  / lɪˌlæp səˈfoʊ bi ə /

May 9 - pervicacious  / ˌpɜr vɪˈkeɪ ʃəs /

May 10 - chryselephantine  / ˌkrɪs ɛl əˈfæn tɪn /

May 11 - bai  / baɪ /

May 15 - paronomasia  / ˌpær ə noʊˈmeɪ ʒə /

May 16 - logophile  / ˈlɔ gəˌfaɪl /

May 17 - ferhoodle  / fərˈhud l /

May 18 - quidnunc  / ˈkwɪdˌnʌŋk /