Fourth and Fifth Grades
Welcome to the NCPS parent page for Fourth and Fifth Grades. Within this page, you will find a variety of reading resources that were carefully gathered by the NCPS reading team. We hope you will explore these reading resources and use them with your children.
What is an Orton-Gillingham approach?
Nelson Public Schools teaches reading and spelling using an Orton-Gillingham approach. Our intervention teachers use S.P.I.R.E. which is an explicit, systematic, and multi-sensory approach to reading and spelling instruction. Our 4th and 5th grade students are continuing to learn vowel patterns, while also reading words with more complex syllables. Fourth and fifth grade students are also working on studying morphology which includes prefixes, suffixes, and Latin and Greek roots.
Syllable Types
Students in 4th and 5th grades are learning to read multi-syllabic words. The students learn six different syllable types. Check out this guide to the different types of syllables!
What is morphology?
Morphology is the study of word parts such as prefixes, suffixes, and Latin and Greek roots. Morphemes are the smallest unit of a word that has meaning.
90% of English words with more than one syllable are Latin based and most of the remaining 10% are Greek based. (Newton, Padack, & Rasinski 2011)
60% of the words used in text in our English language contain Greek and Latin bases. (Henry, 2010)
With the knowledge of just 14 bases, you can build 100,000 words! (J.I. Brown, 1971)
Check out the following article which discusses the benefits of teaching morphemes to young readers as they learn both how to read the morphemes and learn their meanings to develop their vocabulary and word knowledge.
journal.imse.com/harnessing-the-power-of-latin-and-greek-for-early-readers/