focus on word construction

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focus on word construction
By JD

I'm also a first year teacher, but I have a pretty good idea of how I am going to start teaching my kids about words. Personally, I think that spelling tests in first grade are not a very good assessment of their development
as a speller. Regular spelling tests do not give me the info I want on a child. (They are also a little scary for the children.) Assessment is an important part of school, and the students will encounter this throughout the year, but the whole premise of spelling tests is to test isolated content. And we have to remember that spelling is developmental.
Look at the students' writing

when they come in to assess their spelling development: Can they hear the beginning sounds of words, Are they using only consonants or consonants and vowels? Are all the syllables present in the words they have written?
From here, you can start developing lessons that focus on word construction. Devote whole group and centers to playing with chunks and rhyming. Show they kids and involve them in how the words can become other words.

There is a good assessment where you ask students to write words based on pictures they see and the teacher's oral reading of the word. (Some of the words are dress, table, shark, scissors...) Each word represents different constructions. You give this assessment about 3-4 times a year and you can really see a difference--you can see your kids moving through the different levels of spelling development.

There is also a neat assessment called the "Monster Assessment." I don't remember where I heard about this, but you have a piece of paper folded kind of like a fan, and throughout the year, you come back and test the kids on the same words, on different segments of the paper. Each word has different configurations.

Using a word wall for high frequency words is also a good resource for students. You might share the expectation that all of the words on the word wall be spelled correctly in their writing.

There are a lot of books on this topic. I am also going to use the idea from the book _Building Words_. (I think.) Although most (if not all) of the words are too much for the beginning of the year, the idea is that each student has a collection of particular letters at her spot, and the whole class goes through making different words together. As the teacher, you plan where to start and end, guiding the experimentation along.

Good luck!