📖 Engage with the Page: Where Morphemes Meet Magic ✨

Building Better Readers with Fionna Hamilton’s Literacy Treasure Chest

Let’s be honest—when most people hear the phrase "explicit morphology instruction", their eyes glaze over faster than a donut in a bakery. 🍩 But thanks to literacy expert Fionna Hamilton, morphology isn’t dry or dull—it’s dynamic, delightful, and dare we say… fun.

Enter her brilliantly named resource: Engage with the Page.

It’s like Morphology’s cool cousin who brings wordplay to the party, helps your kids crack the code of spelling, and still leaves time for a vocabulary victory dance. 🕺📚

🧠 Wait—What Even Is Morphological Awareness?

Before we dive into Hamilton’s goodies, let’s break down the jargon.
Morphological awareness is just a fancy way of saying:

“Can your child recognize parts of words—like roots, prefixes, and suffixes—and use them to figure out what words mean or how they’re spelled?”

It’s a powerhouse skill. Research shows it boosts spelling, vocabulary, and even reading comprehension. And Fionna Hamilton? She’s handing you the tools to teach it with zero worksheets and maximum meaning.

🎒 What Is Engage with the Page?

Engage with the Page is a treasure trove of printable, ready-to-use literacy routines grounded in Structured Word Inquiry. Hamilton brings morphemes to life by encouraging students to:

• Investigate words like detectives 🕵️

• Discover word families and connections

• Think critically about how language works

These aren't just worksheets. They’re word explorations. Think graphic organizers, word webs, morpheme maps, and delightful inquiry-based tasks that make kids say, “Wait, spelling can be like science?”

Yes. Yes, it can.

🧰 Try This: An Engage with the Page-Inspired Routine

Here’s an example of how you might use one of Hamilton’s resources at home or in the classroom:

🔍 Word of the Week Investigation

Let’s say your word is “construct.”
Using one of Hamilton’s matrix templates, you can explore:

• Base: <struct> (Latin: to build)

• Prefix options: con-, de-, in-, re-

• Suffix options: -ion, -ure, -ed, -ing

Have students create word sums:

• con + struct → construct

• re + struct + ion → restruction

• in + struct + or → instructor

Then challenge them:

“Can you define each word? Draw it? Use it in a sentence? Spot it in your reading?”

This isn’t just vocabulary—it’s vocabulary with depth.

🧒 Why Kids (and Grown-Ups) Love It

• It’s visual and hands-on 🖍️

• It connects spelling to meaning, not just memorization

• It promotes curiosity and confidence

• It makes word learning feel like discovery, not drudgery

💬 Final Word

Fionna Hamilton’s Engage with the Page isn’t another “extra thing to do”—it’s a better way to do what you’re already trying to teach. Whether you're a parent helping with homework or a teacher planning your next literacy block, her resources turn spelling into storytelling and morphology into magic.

So go ahead. Pick a page. Engage with it. You might just find your students engaged with every word they read after that.

🧠✨📖