Week 1
Lesson 1
A History of English
This introductory lesson will teach learners about the fascinating history of the English language and how we have gotten to where we are today. We'll also discuss why having a consistent spelling system across the English-speaking world is so important, and we'll examine the idea that English spelling is more interested in communicating meaning than sounds. 
 Week 2
Lesson 2
Phonemes, Graphemes and Morphemes
Students will learn the definitions of phonemes, graphemes, and morphemes and how they work together to spell words. We will work on doing some phoneme-grapheme mapping and also work on starting to break words apart to look for their parts.  
 Week 3
Lesson 3
Word Families
Students will learn about Word Families, and see that words that are connected in meaning will also share connections in how they are spelled. We will also learn how to use a matrix to build words from a common word family. 
 Week 4
Lesson 4
Suffixing Conventions Part 1: Silent e
We’ll begin to start thinking like “word scientists” and will start to look at some of the rules of adding suffixes to bases, including when to drop the single, silent e at the end of a base word. 
 Week 5
Lesson 5
Suffixing Conventions Part 2: Doubling Final Consonants
We will continue to explore the rules of suffixing, focusing on the doubling of final consonants, and learn the difference between a vowel suffix and a consonant suffix, and begin to use flowcharts to help make decisions about spelling. 
 Week 6
Lesson 6
Suffixing Conventions Part 3: Changing y to i
This week will examine what happens when base words ending in y have a suffix added to them. Students will again think like "word scientists" to determine the rules for any spelling changes to a base that ends in y. 
 Week 7
Lesson 7
Different Types of Bases
In this lesson, we will learn the difference between a bound base and a free base and continue building words with a matrix to apply the suffixing rules we have learned. 
 Week 8
Lesson 8
Practicing Suffixing
We will spend this lesson practicing applying the three different suffixing rules by building words with both bound bases and free bases.
 Week 9
Lesson 9
Four Questions
In this lesson, we will learn about four questions you can ask yourself when you are trying to figure out how to spell a word which may help you spell the word correctly and learn more about how to research a word's history to understand its spelling.  
 Week 10
Lesson 10
Content Words and Function Words
We'll learn that every word in English can be put into one of two groups, and how understanding these groups can help us understand why some words are spelled the way they are. 
 Week 11
Lesson 11
Etymological Markers
In this lesson we will continue to practice applying the Four Questions for understanding a spelling, and learn about the role of etymological markers in some commonly used words.
 Week 12
Lesson 12
Summing it Up
In our final lesson of the class, we will continue to practice thinking like word scientists to ask questions about spelling.  We'll continue to practice with the Four Questions and researching a word's history, and we will summarize and review all of our learning over the past 12 weeks.