Saturday, February 16, 2013

Stages of Spelling Development


When collecting writing samples from my classroom, I noticed that there are students in various stages of spelling development.  The first student seems to be in Stage 4: Syllables and Affixes Spelling.  Overall, most words are spelled correctly.  The few misspelled words include, “clime” instead of “climb”, “the” instead of “then”, and “sculpters” instead of “sculptures”.  This student uses consonant doubling correctly, because he correctly spells words like “cannon” and “scrubbed”.  He uses inflectional endings in words such as, “riding” and “movies”.  Lastly, this student correctly spells compound words such as, “motorcycle”, and “everybody” along with using some common suffixes such as in the word “packable”, when describing snow.
            I would identify the second student to be in Stage 3: Within-Word Pattern Spelling.  This student mostly uses one-syllable words such as “like” and uses complex consonant sounds, such as “catch” and “walk”.  Use of words such as “like”, “ride” and “bike” also demonstrate student’s knowledge of long-vowel spelling patterns.  This student also confuses spelling patterns by reversing the order of letters.  For example, this student spelt California “Califorina”. I would not classify this student’s spelling to be in Stage 4 like the previous student because he does not understand common endings to words such as –ed, and –s.  This is shown by the student’s use of “visit” instead of “visited” and “plays” instead of “play”. 
            A literacy center activity that would be helpful for these students would be a game that focuses on word endings.  Students could a set of flashcards that have word endings and another set that has words.  With a partner students could try and come up with as many words with appropriate word endings as they could.  For a challenge, students would be asked to write sentences including these found words.  This would support students learning because both of these students have trouble with inflectional ending in their spelling development. 

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