Dae Selcer started her second-grade English language class with an energetic song: “The Sentence Chant,” sung to the tune of “Meet the Flintstones.”

“Oh what is a sentence?

A sentence is a complete thought. With a capital letter!”

The children sang the words and performed the hand motions they knew by heart, snapping their fingers and hitting the table in rhythm. It was late May, and this class—a mix of East African and Latino students—would soon be advancing to third grade at Prodeo Academy, a charter school in Columbia Heights. 

What I’d come to see in the Prodeo Academy classroom was a glimpse of the future: how Minnesota’s new literacy law might affect English learners.

The law requires teachers to receive new literacy training and for districts to use evidence-based reading curricula, in line with practices known as the science of reading. But some schools have adopted these practices already—including Prodeo Academy. 

These kids started the year confusing their Bs and Ds. Now, they were learning to build complex vocabulary words by combining small parts of a word—a concept known in linguistics as a morpheme.

“Looking at a small part of a word helps us figure out the meaning,” Selcer reminded her class. She then mapped out a series of morphemes on the board: un, in, habit, able, at, ing.

“‘Habit’ means to live,” she said, adding that it came from a Latin root. And when “at” comes at the end of the word, it means place, she told them. She showed them how to combine the word parts into habitat. The students penciled the meanings in their packets.

“What’s a habitat?” Selcer asked them.

“Place to live,” the children chorused.

“A what?” Selcer asked, putting her hand to her ear.

“Place to live!” her students shouted.

She then showed the students how to construct another word with similar roots: inhabit—to live in.

“I inhabit this classroom,” she said, gesturing around the room.

“This is your habitat?” one student asked.

Piecing together Latin roots and using linguistics terminology may seem like high-level concepts for eight-year-old multilingual learners, but the kids approached them with enthusiasm. These methods may become more common in Minnesota classrooms as the state’s new reading law takes effect. And at Prodeo Academy, they seemed to be working.

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