Spelling

Last week was our first week of spelling. We had the word family -an. I asked the students to tell me all the words they could think of that rhymed with -an. We brainstormed and thought and wrote. Only words that ended in -an were written, even the nonsense words, because when we take the DiBELS test next week, there is a whole LIST of words that are nonsense words and students need to be able to use their knowledge of word families and letter sounds to figure out those "words". We wrote those on the side. Then out of our brainstormed list, I selected 10 words for our very first Spelling Test on Friday. We read poems that used our word family and did a few activities throughout the week using our word family. We got our Spelling Notebooks to write our weekly list into. The students even had a Challenge Word. My name. It was spelled and chanted correctly and put up on the Word Wall. Despite my name being in full view of the entire class, only half were able to spell my name correctly. What does that tell me? That we need to practice using our Word Wall. It will be a wonderful assistant when we are trying to write and edit so that people may easily read our our stories.

In just four days, most of the class was able to achieve a 100% on the Spelling Test and half of the class earned extra points for getting my name correct. For a first test, this was remarkable. I am so looking forward to working with this incredible group of students. They are just SO SMART!