An Expedition into Numbers
I've become distracted by feet. No, it's not because it's almost sandal season. A math loving student wanted to study numbers, so we are working our way up from one. This is so. much. fun. Inspired by Mary Beth Stevens, we have been collecting number words and some of those refer to feet. Of course, I knew humans were bipeds, and dogs and cats were quadrupeds. We had already studied centipedes (which caused us to look at pictures of centipedes and get grossed out). Were there other feet words to discover? Little did we know...
Clams and mussels are unipedal, using their one foot to dig in the mud. A tripod isn't an animal, but it is named for its three feet. And, to our great surprise, a kangaroo is considered pentapedal - using five footed locomotion! (Google it). Surely there is no such thing as a hexapod. Well, of course, insects! We knew that, if we just thought about it. The octopus takes care of eight, and heptapods, with their seven feet, only exist in movies. Nine footed creatures don't exist anywhere that we have found. Would we find a decapod? Yes! Lobsters and crabs are decapods.
Why are some of these words spelled with <ped> and some with <pod>? Etymology, of course. <Ped> comes to us through Latin, and <pod> through Greek. The richness of English also gives number words derived from Old English. These are our cardinal numbers such as one, two, three, etc. These very common words are often tricky to spell. Why is there a <w> in two when we don’t hear it and not in one, where we do (don’t we?). And why is there a <u> in <four> but not in <forty>? (See, there I was trying to think about feet, and I got distracted by numbers. That's how this work is!). We studied these as well, looking at their meaning, history, relatives, phonemes and graphemes.
Whether they are short words or sesquipedalian (do you see the <ped> there?) number words are leading us to a deeper understanding of our language. My student struggles with reading (although she can tell you how many a triple set of quadruplets is faster than most third graders) and with a phonics-based approach she would still be reading passages far below her intellect and interest. She would be memorizing “trick” words like <one> and <two> by writing them five times, spelling them while clapping, or other games. In the case of one and two, the answers are in the relatives, so we invited words like <alone> <only> <twin> and <twelve> to the party. My student had a great time telling me how twelve and twenty are related to two, and because she is a math whiz she really shines while doing this. Number sentences? Words? Arrays? She’s got them all. She has a deep understanding of how numbers work. Words are a different story. They make her nervous. There isn’t any sense to them. She was told to sound them out…except when you can’t.
It was difficult to get this student engaged. She was too anxious, too ready to distract herself from the nonsense of words. She needed to trust me, that I wasn’t playing games, that I had a system to teach her. Is reading easy for her now? Not quite. She’s an ace at recognizing structure and meaning, but pronunciation still trips her up with those shifting phonemes. Still, her mom reports that they don’t have to tell her to get online for her tutoring session anymore, she’s already there. She doesn’t avoid reading like she used to; she’s more confident. With some numbers and some sense, she’s getting her feet under her.
