Word Study vs Old School Spelling

All people see things through a unique lens that has been molded by their own personal life experiences. We interpret, judge, communicate, and learn based on the way we are raised, our own habits, routines, preferences, and values. Teachers are not impervious to this natural inclination to perceive situations with their own personal shading; however, being able to push that aside and see from another’s eyes is what makes superb teachers. In order to do that, it is helpful to examine the ways we were taught, so that in moments of pressure and stress, we continue to strive for best practices rather than reverting to those engrained ways we learned popping up from our subconscious.

When I reflect on the ways that I was taught spelling in elementary school, all I remember are vocabulary lists and quizzes. Weekly vocab lists would be repeated over and over, practiced with activities like sentence writing, word collages, looking words up in dictionaries, rewriting words three times, and more. Some of these activities can be useful and engaging with students in word study, but they need to be used in a different context than they were in my elementary days. Majority of my memories regarding spelling instruction revolve solely around repeating the words and the phrase “sound it out.” The aim of the word study style of instruction is to help students to begin seeing connections of spelling patterns so that they can continue making connections independently as lifelong learners, instead of relying on rote memorization.

Reading Assessment

It is a strong reality that the modern elementary school classroom is abounding with forms of assessment. While we tend to zero in on the different ways that standardized testing hinders effective teaching, we know that there are a variety of ways to assess students, many of which give of invaluable information for instruction.

Informal reading inventories made up of observations and student work portfolios allow teachers to assess progress, reading level, interests, writing ability, and spelling. Collections of work throughout quarters and over the course of a year can illustrate how far a student has come, when we are sometimes too close to see the change as it happens. Informal observations during normal reading block give knowledge that is paramount to fairly assessing where a student belongs for grouping and can help teachers to shape lesson plans in a universal design. Differentiation is critical to this subject ,where every student in any given class will be struggling or excelling at different things at any given time. When you know going in to a unit that Mary is having trouble moving on from ‘ar’ words, and that Matt is no longer challenged by the spelling words, your lesson plan will form around this information naturally, rather than later going back to adapt once the lesson gets going.

Although the benefits of informal assessment are quite obvious to me, what I still need to know in order to feel more comfortable assessing my students is how to take those informal observations and organize them. I feel competent in gaining the information about my students and interpreting their individual work, but when it comes to compiling that into a picture of my whole class, I am timid about what to do next. I theoretically know how to sort into reading levels based on different text sets and basal readers, however, have not had any practice in doing so. After seeing my practicum teachers’ groupings of students, I can see that the groups make sense, but I have not had the opportunity to see first hand how they got to that point.

Fluency in the Elementary Classroom

When it comes to reading instruction in the elementary grades, teachers must concern themselves with students’ fluency, comprehension, and word study. All are vital building blocks to children’s overall abilities as readers, and when all are represented in the classroom, stronger readers are bound to come out.

Fluency refers to the speed and expressiveness with which a student is able to read. This part of reading instruction is where we assert that strong readers do so much more than just say the words on a page. Reading is more than just being able to see individual letters and sound them out into the word they comprise. Fluency means that one can quickly recognize words and weave sentences together in the process of meaning making. A student who can only read in a choppy… monotone… unpunctuated… manner… has not developed fluency. Without having reached that level of reading, the student will struggle to remember what they just read, having had to start and stop, start and stop. When the student stumbles slowly through a paragraph, they are more likely to come away knowing they read a stream of sounds and words rather than the meaning or message of those words.

Every level of reader has the ability to improve their speed and expressiveness, whether they are an emergent, beginner or instructional reader. As a teacher of emergent readers, I would want to use many songs and pattern books in the classroom. I believe that students’ fluency improves as their comfort and familiarity with language as a whole improves. Practicing reading with a “sing-song” voice reinforces the vocal patterns that we want children to start hearing as part of their inner voices. Automatic word recognition is often the focus with beginning readers in relation to fluency, and as such, I would want to use a lot of familiar texts in the classroom. This is a time that young readers need to feel successful and know what it is like to read accurately and smoothly, even if that means they are reading a text for the fiftieth time. To up the ante with instructional readers, I would utilize timed readings, as well as more poetry. Poetry encourages expression and self-monitored pacing, which students will then apply to all of their reading. I love the idea of working with students on poetry every week so that they have a poetry collection they can read and reread independently.

At all stages of development, practice and repetition are key to increasing students’ fluency. There are so many ways to incorporate fluency lessons into the classroom. From interdisciplinary reader’s theaters, which I have done in my fifth grade practicum, to familiar songs during transitions, there are endless opportunities to enhance this critical part of reading instruction.