Spelling

For spelling practice this year we are going to be using a blog rather than a spelling book. Research has shown that personal spelling lists benefit the learner more than words from lists published by textbook writers. Because of this research, our spelling practice will look a little differently than first and second grade. Each Monday we will be creating an online spelling list for our words that week.

While we will be learning and practicing specific spelling strategies in class, each student will also be learning how to recognize words he/she is misspelling during our writing times and those words will become part of his/her personal spelling list as well. I recognize that this will be a challenging concept at first, both for the students and the parents. If you notice that your child is misspelling certain words in his/her writing, encourage him/her to use that word as one of the spelling words the following week.

It will work like this: Each week we will introduce a grade appropriate spelling strategy, ie: consonant, vowel, consonant or changing the y to i before adding a suffix. We will choose five words for the students to practice and then the students will peruse their own writing, vocabulary words we are learning from our science and social studies, cool words we’ve found during our reading times, words about life, etc. and add five of them to their list. That’s a total of ten words.

Monday night the students’ homework will be to record the spelling words on Voice Memo for our practice test on Tuesday. On Fridays, we will take our spelling test using the Voice Memo we made on Monday. If your child misses more than one word on Friday’s test, the test will come home for a signature. If your child missed one or less, it will not come home for a signature. Any words missed will be added to the following week’s test.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask!