Hello Tuesday! 2.5 more days of school for me!! We can do it. We can do it. We can do it.
It’s time for another Submission For Smorgie and another EPIC give away for my 2 year
blog-iversary super celebration!!! It’s a lot to take in. Can we handle it?!
Let’s get started. Today’s Submission For Smorgie is about how I do Word Study in my classroom. Word Study is how we teach spelling. It’s not lists that we memorize and test on. It’s an approach where we are learning the features and patterns of words and implementing those into our spelling. It’s great for phonemic awareness because students are learning to listen for certain sounds and features. I have no doubt that word study plays a key role in our DIBELS scores being so good.
Trust me. I was SUPER skeptical at first. Totally against this. I mean, I did the whole spelling list every week and I’m a good speller….so why not do it that way?!?!
But then I started doing it and saw a huge improvement in my students’ writing. When I moved to Kindergarten, I was worried about how in the world it would work in kindergarten. People, it’s amazing. The growth in writing is tremendous and THEY BEG TO DO IT! Seriously. We love word study.
We use these books for our word study and DSA (Developmental Spelling Analysis) is the test we use to group and differentiate our word study. YES! It’s differentiated to meet the needs to students where they are!!
These pictures show the test (bottom) and a student test. The test on the right is mid-year and the test on the left is the end of the year.
These books contain the sorts that we use. Our district provides these for us, but they are available on Amazon. Just click the books to check them out. They’re worth the investment. TRUST ME! There are more books but these are the three that work with Kindergarten.
This is the book that contains the assessment pieces and lots of other helpful information on using word study in a classroom.
Here’s the video. It’s 11 minutes. You see Alex working through the different pieces of word study and I explain what we do and how we do it. As always, leave a comment with any questions or click the Submissions For Smorgie button on the right side of the page and leave a question!
(Hopefully I edited this into the right order…it’s the first time I’ve used clips to make a video…mustaches crossed)
You can also the video on YouTube!
And now for a Scentos mega prize pack give away!
People, this massive Scentos prize pack can be yours!! ALL YOURS!!! Just enter with the Rafflecopter below and one lucky winner gets this smelly goodness sent to their door!!!
