| Students benefit from having opportunities to examine words in purposeful and guided lessons that encourage them to develop their powers of observation an their critical skills of inquiry. (Newlands, 2011) | | It's Monday again and that means its time to continue our study of the great article by Michelle Newlands (2011) called Intentional spelling: Seven steps to eliminate guessing. Each week I will be going over one of the seven steps and providing ideas and activities for you to use in applying that step to your spelling instruction.
Today's step: Observe patterns and trends is all about helping students to make connections about different spelling patterns. For example: if students notice that the last four letters in these two words (light, sight) are the same and sound the same. Then spelling words with similar patterns (night, right, flashlight, tight) becomes much easier.
The following activities can help students recognize patterns between words. Spelling Activities Making Words Making words is a manipulative activity, originally developed by Patricia Cunningham, where students can learn patterns in words through rearranging a set number of letters and trying to find out the big word that those letters will make. The above video describes the benefits of using a making words lesson. The next video is a lesson that you can use after the making words activity to focus students attention on the patterns in the words. Word Families | Word Ladders Word ladders are a great activity for students to recognize patterns between words. A word ladder starts with a word at the bottom of the ladder. The objective is to change the first word into the second word by changing parts of the original word using clues and directions into new words until you reach the top of the ladder.
There are numerous commercial word ladder that you can purchase but I've got a great set of word ladders for first and second grade that you can get for only $3.50.
These word ladders are all Pirate themed so they can be more motivating for students to complete. 
| Word Sorts You can also have your students do word sorts to identify spelling patterns. There are two main types of word sorts, open and closed. A closed word sort is when the spelling pattern is already identified and students must sort the word according to those patterns. In an open word sort the student is the one who determines how they want to categorize the words. Newlands, M. (2011). Intentional spelling: Seven steps to eliminate guessing. The Reading Teacher, 64(7), 531-534.
This Thursday, the theme for the 50% off sale and freebie is file folder games. You can get the file-folder game butterfly colors for free, and a great packet of dragon themed math games for 50% off. You can also check out our other great file-folder games.  With this download you get 4 math games that are great for 1st grade plus and rhyming game. The math skills that kids will go over are: Even and odd, adding doubles, skip counting and paying attention to the addition or subtraction sign. This game is usually $2.50 but today only it is $1.25.
|  Butterfly colors is a file folder game designed to help students learn to recognize color words. They do this by helping six caterpillars become butterflies. The great this about this game is that kids receive immediate feedbac
| The 50% off sale and giveaway are over. You can still purchase both of the games here on my file folder games page.
There is a great anchor chart set from The Teacher Wife blog about when to double the final consonant when adding ing or ed. You can click on the link to go to her blog and get the posters for the chart for free.
In my professional reading about spelling instruction I've just come across a great article in the reading teacher by Michelle Newlands (2011) called Intentional spelling: Seven steps to eliminate guessing. Its a great article and I would encourage everyone to read it.
When I was reading the article however I got a great idea for a series on blog posts. So I'm going to write one blog post about each of the seven steps and hopefully give you resources, ideas, and activities for implementing that step in your spelling instruction program. So since this is the first day, I'm going to cover the first rule, Know the spelling rules.
Know the spelling rules There are over one million words in the English language. How can anyone learn how to spell those words be memorizing them one at a time. | English spelling can seem chaotic or even random at times, for example consider the following words Wednesday (do you here a d in that word, because I sure don't), thumb, know, should, (there are lots of silent letters in English) and of course there are words that look the same like tear and tear that are spelled the same but sound completely different. Not withstanding these examples English spelling does follow some rules. Being able to understand the structure of English spelling can make spelling new and unfamiliar words seem less daunting. | | - I before e except after c - When you think of spelling rules the one that usually comes to mind first is, "i before e except after c." You might not have heard of the next line though, "or when pronounced ay as in neighbor or weigh. Other exceptions are: weird, species, science, sufficient, foreign. To see more exceptions you can go to this Wikipedia article.
- Prefixes do not change the spelling of words they are added to. - They don't even change when the prefixes last letter and the first letter of the word are the same. Ex - misspell, impossible, reenter, unlucky, unnoticed. For a list of prefixes, their meanings and words you can visit EPS, go to the bottom of the page under Pedagogical Information and click on Prefix and Suffix word list information. You can also download Little blue men from space game for a prefix and suffix game.
- The letter q is always followed by u. - Exceptions: there are several words with foreign origins (often arabic) that don't use u. Ex: burqua, qadi(a muslim judge), qi (often spelled chi, or ki, Chinese for life force.)
- In open syllables vowels at the end of the syllable are often long - Ex: belong, protect, table, paper Exceptions: the vowel i may say it's name or it may sound like "ee"
| |  Spelling rules usually have many exceptions. When your teaching a rule don't forget to have some examples of words that don't follow the rule. Teaching the exceptions will greatly increase the number of words that students will be able to spell correctly.
For more complete lists of English spelling rules you can visit the following links: Newlands, M. (2011). Intentional spelling: Seven steps to eliminate guessing. The Reading Teacher, 64(7), 531-534.
So for the longest time you could only post comments on blog posts on this site, but if you wished to comment on any of the other pages you couldn't. I've finally found a solution to the problem through Facebook. Now on most the of the regular pages (I haven't quite got to all of them yet you will see a comment box at the bot
With summer about half over I'm already seeing so many advertisements for back to school. I can't believe that summer is going by so quickly, can you? So for all of you preparing to go back to the classroom soon I've decided to have a back to school count down. Every Thursday (hopefully) I will be having one of many items in my store be released for free and another for 50% percent off. Today I'm going to be focusing on classroom management resources. You can get one of my bathroom and hall passes set for free and just for today my classroom job labels is %50 percent off. The give away and sale is over. Come back next Thursday for a new giveaway.
This idea comes from the Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas Blog. To see her post and get directions on playing the game click on the link or the picture to go to her blog. | | For more ideas on teaching sight words, including sight word worksheets, file folder games, sensory activities, board games and some free sight word readers visit my teaching sight words page. |
So I've taken the SIP (Spelling in Parts) strategy by Debbie A. Powell and Roberta Aram (2008) and tweaked it a little to make it a little more physical for my kinesthetic learners. Now instead of just circling the syllables they will be cutting the word up and using a fun foldable to learn the word. You can download the foldable for free at the bottom of this post.  Steps
1. Say and clap your spelling word's syllables.
2. Cut the word into syllables and say the syllable as you separate them into each flap.
3. Say a syllable and then spell each syllable one at a time.
4. Choose one syllable to cover up that is the easiest for you to spell.
5. Keep on spelling the word, a syllable at a time, and covering the flaps, easiest to hardest, until all of the flaps are down and you can spell the word without looking.
 | Syllable Spelling Strategy | | File Size: | 435 kb | | File Type: | pdf |
Download File
Powell, D. A., & Aram, R. (2008). Spelling in parts: A strategy for spelling and decoding polysyllabic words. The Reading Teacher,61(7), 567-570.
So this summer I'm focusing my professional reading on spelling instruction and today I came across this wonderful strategy by Debbie A. Powell and Roberta Aram (2008) in The Reading Teacher. This strategy requires that break apart the word into syllables (not that earth shattering, I know) and then learn to spell each syllable instead of memorizing a whole word at a time. So many kids looks at a big word and then get immediately overwhelmed when trying to learn how to spell it. This strategy helps, by breaking up spelling the word into more manageable parts. The steps to this strategy are: - Say and clap the word's syllables.
- Divide the word into it's syllables and pronounce each syllable.
- Say a syllable, then spell it, say a syllable, then spell it.
- Circle syllables with harder spelling patterns.
- Create a mnemonic device for the syllable. (I would think that this step is optional)
- Cover, say a syllable, write the syllable, say a syllable, write the syllable, etc.
Powell, D. A., & Aram, R. (2008). Spelling in parts: A strategy for spelling and decoding polysyllabic words. The Reading Teacher,61(7), 567-570.
 Many of the students that I'm tutoring this summer are all struggling with the same thing: Spelling. The bring 10 spelling words home and test on Friday just isn't working for them. I do have a great phonics activity called Pirate word ladders, that can help students start thinking about different spelling patterns but I want tons more ideas.So my new project this summer is to focus on spelling instruction. I'm going to go on a professional reading spree about the subject and share my thoughts and creations with you. My first goodie that I've found is at the Teachem2think site. About half way down the page is a great chart on fun ways to practice spelling.
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