Think Piece #6

Inventive spelling is an important stage of a child’s development.  In the primary grades, students need the opportunity to use inventive spelling in their writing.  There are many stages that students go through in the development of learning spelling and spelling patterns.  Each step is key and has different characteristics.  It is sometimes difficult to sit back and watch your students phonetically spell words and not correct them. 

Best Practices in Writing Instruction states, “Throughout much of U.S. educational history, spelling was a core element of literacy instruction.”  Just as with most of the curriculum there has been a shift.  In school, we used to be very spelling based.  We have shifted to focus more on teaching the skills of spelling and emphasize memorization of spelling words less.  When we drill spelling words, the students are simply memorizing.  Some students will remember how to spell the words down the road, but most do not.  We still give students spelling lists everything week and expect them to learn the words by the test on Friday.  The difference is that we focus more on the skill during the week rather than the rote memorization of the words.  Spelling can also be incorporated with vocabulary in the classroom.  On Monday I give my students a list of their spelling words and go over them. When I do this I also review the skill associated with all of the words.  I do not give my students spelling homework in which they write the words five times each or put them in a sentence.  I remember having to do this as a child.  I always just rushed through it to get it done and did not learn much.  In school I generally did well on spelling tests, but not everyone did.  I have seen many students become frustrated with spelling tests.  Although I do give spelling tests I do not devote too much time or emphasis on them.  During our Daily Five rotations students have the options of choosing the word work center where they can practice their spelling words in a hands on approach.  They can make their words using wikki sticks, play dough, or a white board.  They can also write a story using their spelling words or make a word search with their spelling words. 

As I was reading about sentence combining in both the article and the book, I realized how often my students do not do this.  Many of my students write short choppy sentences that all sound similar.  I try to help them understand that if you write your sentences all sound similar, the reader will become bored.  I write examples of my own in which most of the sentences have the same sentence structure and sound repetitive.  The students recognize that this is boring and the reader will loose interest in the writing piece.  The difficult part is trying to help the students incorporate skills such as sentence combining in their own writing to make it sound better.  During writing workshop this week I plan to work on sentence combining with my students and encouraging them to use it in their own writing.  I will start small and have students work on the skill in isolation.  Once they understand the concept, I will have them use it in their writing pieces. 

Think Piece #5

 

            It is important to set a purpose for writing just as you do for reading.  Students need purpose and direction.  Best Practices in Writing Instruction states,

“In a world where student achievement if often gauged by the application of a pencil to a multiple-choice bubble, it is important to remember that writing is a performance task that requires substantial effort, motivation, persistence, strategic planning, and skill as well as knowledge about the topic.”

Our students live in a world full of testing.  As the book states, most testing is in the form of coloring in a circle for scan tron, multiple-choice questions.  Student can get by on those types of assessments without putting much effort in.  Writing assessments are very different.  The product is important, but so is the process students use to get to the final product.  Assessments should assess both of these pieces of the writing process.  To begin the writing process you need a clear purpose and audience.  The audience needs to be one students can relate to and write with a purpose.  When my second graders were working on persuasive writing, I made their audience their parents.  This is an audience in which the students know how to get their attention. The purpose for writing was to persuade their parents to change their bedtime to a later time.  The students of course loved writing about this were very interested in this topic. 

            Writing can be incorporated in all parts of the curriculum.  Writing can help you assess students not only in the writing process, but also in other subject areas.  It takes time for students to be able to clearly express their thoughts and ideas about content in their writing.  The writing process should be taught as a lesson in itself before it is used to communicate information.  Students need to understand the process in order to use it as a tool of successful communication.  All students are different, some may write a piece that is well-organized and grammatically correct but does not include the correct information while another student could write a poorly organized piece with all of the correct information.  It takes time to develop a well-organized writing piece for communication.              Teachers should use writing assessments to guide their writing instruction while testing is used to assess the actual writing.  There is stress placed on students in testing situations.  They have a limited time and receive no assistance.  Students need practice in these situations because they will encounter them both in and out of school.  Students need practice being put in these situations so they know how to approach them.  Much prep time in classrooms is spent not only on content prep for New York State Assessments, but also on how to take the test.  This is especially important for Special Education students.  State tests put so many writing demands on students that it will help put them at ease if they have a plan of how to take the test.