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.