Pattern-Building When Learning a New Word

Words are fundamentally conceptual—although they are physical objects, they represent something ideational. Just giving students definitions of words or having them evaluate the context of word use does not fully use the brain’s patterning style of identifying information. Th e value of word pattern sorting extends beyond their defi nition to relating words to the pattern of categorization where they fi t. Students attend to how words relate to other words through a number of types of cat...

 Blending and Segmenting Sounds to Instill Phoneme Awareness

One activity is segmenting sounds and then blending them together using both real words and nonsense words. This activity gives students practice manipulating phenomes and is consistent with the research supporting stimulation of both posterior processing systems (McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003). Another activity is oral blending and segmenting paired with letters. This process may help students practice the alphabetic principle (the establishment of a correspondence between a phonem...

 Explaining the Name "ideonexus"

The name "ideonexus" is not an English word, but it is a combination of two words: "ideo" and "nexus." The "ideo" is a version of the word "idea" (想法) that we use in compound words, like "ideology." The word "nexus" means "intersection" (路口), "relationship" (关系), or "connection" (连接). So the name "ideonexus" is something I made up to symbolize my interest in connecting and relating ideas to one another (maybe "想法连接"?).