Sunday, February 10, 2013
Tompkins
After observing my students writing, I have come to the conclusion they are all at various levels. Some students are at the letter name- alphabetic principle. That is, students are learning that phonemes represent words, but the spellings are abbreviated. For exmaple: "iswdrnbw" could mean "I saw the rainbow". Then, there are other students who are in stage 3, within-word pattern spelling. That is, the majority of the techniques are correctly in place, but some patterns of spelling are off. In order to design a center activity to help improve their spelling, it is important to cater to both student groups and their specific needs. I feel the best way to do this is by creating a center that has children use their weekly study words to create a short story. For example, if the week's words were "the" "and" "that" and "him" students could create a story using those words. This ensures the students are working on their spelling and word recognition skills without explicitly correcting them. Furthermore, it allows them to use their own imagination and inventive spelling. Nonetheless, as each week goes on, the students will learn more and more words and be able to incorporate those into their story in hopes of creating a full on sentence with proper spelling.
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I can relate to Allison's post that many of my students are in the withing-word phase. Although my students are all in very different levels of reading and writing, they all seen to be within a limited spectrum of literacy. Many of my students, also kindergarten as Allison's, are still learning the basics of spelling and are still mastering phonemes. last week during my visit to the school I tested their ability to spell words within 20 second intervals. I made this literacy activity a game and made students take turns spelling both familiar and unfamiliar words. Students worked together to formulate how some words might be spelled and then were given the opportunity to spell out the word within 20 seconds. From this activity, I found that many students could relate familiar words to the spelling of new words demonstrating their understanding of letting sounds and combinations of sounds within words.
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