When my daughter was in fourth grade, she uncovered something awesome. While she was able to read fairly well by this point, there were still plenty of times when she came to unfamiliar words that required word attacking. On this occasion, she came to the unfamiliar word intuition.
Even though I knew breaking this word down wouldn’t help her, I still encouraged her to try. After she removed the prefix and the suffix she stared at the three letters remaining, ‘tui.’ “What does tui mean?” she asked.
I shrugged, so she moved on to a different strategy—this time listing variations of the word intuition. This strategy only yielded one variant—intuitive (a word she’d heard me use often)—still she couldn’t place the definition.
Rather than returning to the original variant, intuition, she decided to stick with intuitive choosing to break this word down into syllables which looked like this on the whiteboard: in to it ive. (Yes she changed the u to an o)
Once she got to this point, she narrowed her eyes and turned to me, “I don’t know what to do with ive.” So, I suggested a contraction. After she inserted the apostrophe, I smiled.
“What is it?” she asked looking back at the whiteboard.
“Look,” I pointed, “In to it I have. That’s the meaning of intuition!”
And it’s true! Inside of us we have. In to it YOU have!!!
Much Love,
Phoenix
Phoenix Inspiring 