Word Inquiry: Harnessing The Power of Words

Workshop Leader: Fiona Hamilton

Fiona Hamilton is the owner and director of wordtorque. With 38 years of Australian and international educational experience, she has MEd degrees in Educational Administration and Literacy, plus Literacy Coaching certification. She provides educators with accurate information about English orthography and easy-to-implement teaching strategies. 

Words take fascinating journeys, twisting through history in meaning, pronunciation, spelling, and structure. Wordtorque brings that journey into classrooms, combining explicit teaching with inquiry so students truly understand words. They become word noticers who grow into word knowers - readers and thinkers with skills to explore connections, build vocabulary, and understand language deeply. 

Fiona collaborates on Engage with the Page and searchENGAGE with Angela Brienza and Lauren Hateley-Crowe. Engagewthepage is a regular free post on wordtorque.com highlighting picture books and showing the different concepts of word inquiry you can teach from each book. searchENGAGE is the accompanying searchable database that includes over 300 picture books linking them with key orthographic features. It makes finding the perfect read aloud text to support your word study easy. Search by bases, affixes, graphemes, phonemes, word histories, and classroom connections.

The High Frequency Word Project, coauthored by Fiona Hamilton and Rebecca Loveless  is an explicit, systematic resource that explains the letter-sound links for 130 high frequency words, giving teachers strategies for making them stick. It also offers linguistically-accurate and fascinating stories about high frequency words’ etymologies providing the missing link to explain their spelling.