The power of one!
Although this article is about a number of significant orthographic principles there are two topics that are particularly pertinent for me: Unravelling the 'story' of one word reveals the intertwined 'stories' of many other words. Investigating <one> clearly demonstrates that meaning and structure are the main concern of English orthography not pronunciation! Recently, during math week, we investigated the number words, a wonderfully rich source of orthographic understandings. In education, <one> is generally considered a 'sight word' or a 'high frequency word', often a word memorised in isolation. It only seems logical to me, if words are considered high frequency, then we should be investigating and analysing them to fully understand the 'how' and 'why' of the spelling. A teacher recently asked, "How can you investigate all the 'sight words'...that seems impossible?" Do you know the singer/songwriter P