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Guidelines for Administering the Spelling Inventory:

This assessment can be administered whole class, in small groups or individually.  You may administer this inventory over two days.  Make sure to collect enough errors to be able to determine an instructional phonics skill.  If students have missed 5 or more words in a row, or appear beyond their frustration point, they may discontinue the assessment.  In grades K-2, you will not necessarily give the entire list of words.  In grades 3-5, encourage students to attempt all words (but consider what you know about some students in you class to determine if any may need to discontinue).  With that being said, in grades K-2 we gave a suggested stopping point; if you have a student who you think can go further, you many continue assessing them individually or in a small group.

When administering this assessment, please follow this protocol:

1. Teacher introduces this assessment.  You may say something like the following:

Please spell the words I call out.  Some of the words may seem easy or harder for you to spell.  Spell the words the best you can; write all the sounds you hear.  

2. Teacher states the word (have students look at your mouth as you say the word).

3. Students repeat the word.

4. Teacher uses the word in a sentence. 

5. Students spell the word on their recording sheet.

Guidelines for grading the spelling inventory:  

• The Elementary Inventory for consonants is divided into separate sections for beginning and ending sounds, with different scoring possibilities for each. The Primary Inventory, however, combines the two categories. In the Focus section, both beginning and ending consonant sounds are grouped together. To align the scoring of the Elementary Inventory with the Primary Inventory and the Focus section, teachers will need to combine the points for both the beginning and ending consonant sounds in the Elementary Inventory. This will make the total score out of 10 points instead of separate scores of 6 and 4.

Please use the following guidelines when determining errors on the assessment: 

• Reversed Letters: Confusion between letters like 'b' and 'd' or 'p' and 'q' is considered a handwriting error (static reversal) and is not scored as a spelling error.

• Backward Letters: If a student writes a letter backward (e.g., a backward 'j' or 'z'), this is a handwriting error, not a spelling error.

• Capitalization: Using a capital letter where a lowercase one is expected is considered a capitalization error, not a spelling error. The word would still be counted as correctly spelled.

• Please see the image below for how to grade each portion of the assessment.