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August Update at Spiral WarmUps - Annual Upgrades to the WarmUps
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Word Study Curriculum August Update

Have you joined SpiralWarmUps recently and began exploring the knowledge base and product tutorials? These resources will help you understand the massive amount of warm-ups you have at your disposal and the numerous activities that your students will work through.

In this post, you’ll get an update on on our annual upgrade and newest features in the word study curriculum during our August roll-out period. Each year, the warm-ups go through an annual upgrade as activities are replaced and warm-ups are added based on your input and feedback from student performance (learn about this in our research base).

If you’re looking for a more detailed review of the Word Study activities, I suggest you look at Fluency 1 Days 1-10 and Fluency 2 Phoneme Mapping.

August Word Study Launch and Roll-Out

2017 Initial Roll-out

We successfully opened accounts for the free Word Study Warm-Ups on August 1, 2017, and we are currently in our roll-out phase.

During roll-out, members to the free Word Study Warm-Ups will continue to see newly published word study activities and units in their member dashboard.

Roll-out continued into September with two more free courses added to the already published Word Fluency unit. The new Word Study units are Word Building and Word Meaning.

2018 Upgrades + Reading Comprehension

Massive improvements came after over a thousand teachers used Spiral WarmUps in 2017! We increased the word study warm-ups in the Awesome Membership and developed Fluency Builder. Differentiation pathways were added and we included Progress Monitoring to the Awesome Membership.

Find out more about Fluency Builder and Progress Monitoring Here >>

Become an Awesome Member Here >>

2019 & 2020 Refinements

The original Word Study Warm-Ups felt a bit outdated, so we redesigned the entire word fluency units and added 4 new weeks of decoding warm-ups to the free word study warm-ups.

We also discovered from our teacher research that word meaning skills were lacking in their students. So we carefully crafted new word meaning warm-ups to include multiple-meaning words and context clues.


Not a member? You can tap here and register now…it’s free!

Word Study and Word Fluency Activities

As of the time of this update, there are six weeks of warm-ups posted. And two new days are uploading as I type.

The published spiral warm-ups are:

  1. Word Fluency 1: Consonant Blends
  2. Word Fluency 2: Decoding Words

Word Fluency 1 focuses on 2nd and 3rd grade blending activities to build rapid word recognition skills. The content drills down into initial and ending blends that occur in mono- and ploy-syllabic words. The activities scaffold from what is a blend all the way to onset-rimes to timed identification of words.

You can view the full word study scope and sequence here.

Word Fluency 2 adds onto the first four weeks with 10 more days of decoding instruction and practice. Here, students are exposed to 3rd-grade consonant digraphs and 3rd-4th-grade vowel digraphs. Activities increase in rigor with word sorts and rapid, timed word recognition.

Word Building and Word Meaning

The Word Building Unit is complete and is in the upload queue. It is perfect for 3rd-5th grade spellers and 5th-7th grade remediation.

Members will see new weeks of warm-ups in their dashboard in the coming days.

What’s in Word Building?

Word Building focuses on two areas of word knowledge.

  1. Spelling
  2. Making Words

Activities in the Word Building unit include:

  1. editing mistakes,
  2. applying orthographic patterns, 
  3. discovering common spelling patterns, and
  4. building words with affixes, base words, and inflected endings.

What’s in Word Meaning?

Word Meaning is the unit that focuses linking Word Study to reading comprehension and vocabulary development. Particular focus is given to synonyms/antonyms, Greek and Latin roots, affixes, and word-level syntax.

What about Middle School Warm-Ups?

Word Meaning is designed to help upper elementary and middle school students. The focus on root words and affixes will apply to 3rd-5th grade, and the advanced warm-ups will apply to 6th-8th grade.

Word Meaning will roll-out in September. We cannot wait to provide you with these three units of word study!

Your students will have engaging practice, systemic curriculum, and careful scaffolding (a good article from TeamTom Education).

See also, Systematic Scaffolding of Difficulty).

You will have the ease of knowing what and how to teach the first 3-6 minutes of class.

It’s going to be continue to be a win for everyone.

As we’ve covered previously, the word study warm-ups can be used in many ways other than as a warm-up. I recommend viewing 8 Ways to Use other than a Warm-Up.

If you have any suggestions for curriculum or warm-up activities please comment below. Any ideas and question are taken very seriously, and we would love to integrate your suggestions in the free Word Study Warm-Ups!


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