spelling

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Home : 2002 : July : 2

spelling
By sandy

I do something a bit different with my 4th graders. My core program is pretty traditional. I choose 15 "pattern" words each week that follow a rule or pattern(maybe long a's, compound words, double consonant words etc).
Then I add 5 words from a list our grade level is accountable for (taken from a list of 500 high freq. words) Finally I choose 4 challenge words that usually have something to do with what we are studying, names of months, holidays, etc.
They take a pretest on Monday and a test on Friday with assignments in between.
What is different is that once we have worked with these words, especially

those high frequency words, they are held accountable for them. When they complete assignments for me, especially reading assignments, I always tell them to check everything over for correct spellings. They have resources to check if they're unsure of spellings. Once they turn the assignment in to me, all of the words are fair game. I give reading grades based upon the ideas and content, but I also take a spelling grade. Any time I see one of these words they should know how to spell misspelled, I circle it and write the correct spelling. I write -5sp next to it. At the end of the assignment, I count up the number of negative spelling points they have earned, and write that at the top of the assignment. I keep a running total of these points in my grade book. Then at the middle and end of the quarter, I subtract these points from the total earned from tests and assignments.
This may seem like a negative approach, and I did wrestle with this, but it does get my students to focus a bit more on spelling for communication every day and not just for a test. I have also found that this tends to give a more realistic spelling grade. Lots of my students can get As on the tests and homework but their daily spelling is poor. This gives them more incentive to look for correct spelling.