I am struggling with the whole spelling thing. From my own personal experience I can see that traditional spelling tests are not helpful to all students. Unless a teacher is paying attention and willing to work individually with students who don't transfer their knowledge of spelling into the wider world, it's wasted time for those kids. All the other kids usually already know how to spell the words on the list anyway.
On the other hand, I subbed in a 5th grade classroom today where very few words at all were spelled correctly. Some of the kids could not even correctly copy words that the student teacher put on the projector for everyone to write down. We're not talking about big, challenging words. We're talking about words like, "social," "studies," "bored," "lunch," and, my personal favorite of the day, "fart." Yes, bodily functions were misspelled right and left in addition to more socially acceptable words.
So what to do? When you get a whole class of children who are so clearly behind in their ability to spell, what's the right course of action? They were all able to write sentences and even some decent-sized paragraphs, so it's not as though they were completely behind in all language arts areas. At what point should their poor spelling be corrected? And what's the best way to do that without stifling creativity? Am I back to traditional spelling tests? Word pattern study? What? I'm not sure I'd feel right as a teacher if I didn't at least help students improve their spelling somewhat.
Any ideas?
Oooooh, what an interesting quandry! For starters, I would like to know a bit more about the students in this classroom. Sometimes, a low-performing group of kids are assigned to a particular teacher, or the kids feel no motivation to behave properly for a sub and student teacher. There may be other issues at play here. Overall, though, at 5th grade, I believe that they need to be able to correctly copy words from the overhead, at least! That is simply a sign of lack of motivation. All students should be expected to copy correctly-copying is not a creative process.
ReplyDeleteThe best example I've seen regarding learning how to spell was in a 2nd grade classroom where the students were still encouraged to take risks and sound words out, but were also taught how to look up words in the dictionary or on the computer to find the correct spelling. Of course, sometimes they needed someone to help them with this process, but the big idea was to show them how to use the resources they had, then record what they learned in their own personal "Word Journal". Not only were they looking up the correct spelling but also they had documentation of their newly-learned words that they could show off! Sadly, 5th graders are generally past the whole showing-off phase, though. They still should be taught how to find the correct spelling but there is always spellcheck for their computer-generated documents!
The closest I've come to a good spelling experience was when my daughter was in first grade. The teacher did a pre-test at the beginning of the week. Any word a child spelled correctly would be replaced with words from books they were reading (I have no clue how she kept track of that since they didn't read as a whole class), words they attempted to spell on their own in their journals, or words the kids picked on their own. Each child had an individualized spelling list. It was very motivating for them. I helped give spelling tests on Fridays and most of the time they were perfect. As you can imagine, some of the words were crazy hard because that's what the kids wanted to know how to do.
ReplyDeleteShe only had 17 kids in the class after the rosters stabilized. I'm not sure it's humanly possible to do something like that with 30 kids.
Wow! That is definitely a bit discouraging. Well, more than a bit. I'm trying to stay positive this weekend :)
ReplyDeleteI don't know, Patti. Its kind of the age old (or at least decade old) question, isn't it? People say spelling tests are useless (and to a great extent, I agree) but then kids can't spell. Maybe these kids are the result of the change over from traditional spelling methods to more phonics and word bank (kind of what Jill described) methods. There will always be some area of loss when methods are in transition. Maybe this is behind what you experienced?
Also, I've always felt that while spelling tests are pretty rote and all about surface knowledge, that vocabulary tests are a different story. Maybe another way to teach spelling is not just to memorize the structure of the word but also to have to give a meaning or use it in a sentence. I've found I rarely forget how to spell words if I know what they mean and how to use them. Just food for thought!
Patti,
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more with the frustration of the mis-spellings in the upper grades. Last year I had a 6th grader spell was - wuz. I think that there should be point by 3rd or 4th grade that students are taught some of the rules of spelling. These 6th graders had never been taught the basics of spelling, the i before e except after c concept was totally new to them! I know that we are encouraging creativity in their writing but there has to be a point that we do teach some basics. I keep hearing the term spell-check, well, they have to get the word close enough on the computer for spell check to give any options. I think that the fact that they cannot even copy a word correctly from the board tells us that we are de-emphasizing spelling too much. If we accept misspelled words on their writing assignments then why should they worry about misspelling a word in their math story problem?
Good questions! Remember that we want children to use strategies and to work with them to develop more and more sophisticated strategies. That means high standards tailored to children's development. High standards for a young child may involve recognizing the brilliant thinking in a first grader's approximation that shows developing hypotheses about phonics strategies. As children develop a large number of words they know visually (or "own"), you expect more words to be spelled conventionally. We always need to analyze spellings to see the patterns in children's thinking so that we can teach helpful strategies. For example, "social studies" or "lunch" are examples of environmental print that students can easily find on their books or the class schedules as models for double-checking. In a classroom where you have developed a culture of writing, kids care about words! Remember the bloopers and word treasure hunts--these are ways that you show children that spelling matters. If students are writing a final draft or displaying work publicly, use these as opportunities to help them spell everything perfectly.
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