Sitton

Home

Chat

Blogs

Collection

Directory

Home : 2005 : May : 10

Sitton
By Carolyn

My school has used the Rebecca Sitton Program for the last 6 years. You mentioned "new" and I honestly don't know if there is a newer version than what we have.

Three things come to mind right away:
1. Parents have
a difficult time adjusting to the idea of 5 or so new words a week. In reality it is more since they are expected to know the word with endings.
2. We love and believe in the idea of making spelling words words you are accountable for from the time of the spelling test to the end of the year. Our kids have a mini "word wall" in their Writer's Workshop folders that they can use for editing.

It contains the 1st 400 Sitton words (by the end of 3rd grade these are the words our students are responsible for knowing - I can't remember program guidelines.) The words can also pop up at anytime on our spelling tests.

All that said,
3. We use the words but have "made them our own" by reorganizing them into groupings. I teach a 2/3 multiage classroom and after using the program as recommended for 3 years we found that our kids were not making connections to word families. We also wanted a link to teaching the various vowel sounds in groups that made sense to us and our kids.
We do give the kids just a handful of words each week. They are responsible for finding all the "rimes" for that word. Any "rime" could show up on the spelling test.
Example: One word for the week could be "set." The homework sheet tells them the "rime" they are working with is "et." In our class "word of the day" and at home they are responible for coming up with words (pet, met, bet, let).
I don't mean to be insulting, but I hadn't heard the word "rime" until we looked at how we could work with the Sitton program to fill in the gaps we saw with our students. A rime pattern follows the same letter pattern. So some words that sound the same would not fit. In our example "debt" is an example of a word that sounds similar but doesn't fit the "rime." Also there are times that one ending can have different sound (usually happens with vowel combinations).