Stages of Spelling Development

My Kindergarten class has writing time each day where they write in their "orange notebooks" on a topic that is prompted by their teacher.  My mentor teachers usually starts out their sentence and they fill in the rest however they would like.  I took a look at three different writing samples from students in my class.  The first two writing samples I looked at were both examples of Stage 2 writers, the catergory called Letter Name-Alphabetic Spelling.  One student's writing looked like this: "I am specia because I love my famley" and the other student's writing looked like this: "My flufey cat turns into a big blakc cat."  It is clear that both students understand the alphabetic principles, that there is a link between letters and sounds.  It is clear that they are writing the words they don't know by sounding them out becasue one did not put the i in family and the other put a c on the end of black.  They struggle when a word isn't written out exactly how it sounds.   

The other student's writing that I looked at was an Emergent Speller (stage one).  His writing was just a bunch a letters without spaces in between words so it is hard be clear on what he was trying to write.  This student is able to make letters (all of his letters are written in the correct way) and there is a clear distinction between the drawing that he did and the writing he did above it.  He is writing from left to right on this journal page but there really isn't any clear letter-sound matches.

I feel that the majority of my class is either in Stage 1 or Stage 2 so I would do centers that assisted students in both of those areas.  For students who are in Stage 1 I would do a centers activity that focused on student's practicing writing words that are CVC words and their sight words. I would have students use the magnetic letters to build a word then they would have to write the word themselves.  This will give them practice with both spelling the word and writing out the word.  I would do a similar activity for the students in stage 2, I would have them doing build and write with words with consonant blends and digraphs so they would get more practice seeing that just because a word sounds like there is only one letter there can also be a blend of two letters making one sound.