After reflecting on my "letter tiles gone bad" lesson, I only put the letter tiles they needed to make their spelling words in their individual baggy. Today EP is absent. The group was so much more focused. EP tends to talk A LOT and get the whole group off track. Students got out their tiles and made sure they were all facing up. We practiced making spelling words again (ui,ue, and ew word families). This time they did not have the spelling list to look off of. I said a word aloud and the students needed to make the word. BD was the first to make the words first. About half of the time he was correct. HS was consistantly one of the last ones to make words and he was looking around at what the other students were doing. All of the students made "glue" and "blue" correctly. "Fruit" and "suit" were also spelled correctly by almost the whole group. "Clue", "threw" and "knew" were the most missed.
- Clue was spelled as "klue", "clui", and "cluew".
This let me know that it would be helpful to review the different sounds "c" makes. It also shows that on Wednesday, the students have not practiced enough to remember which vowel pair goes with each word. Maybe 3 word families was too much,
- Threw was spelled as "thui", "thrue", "thru", and "thrui".
The student that spelled "thui" often leaved out important sounds when spelling words. They have been working with "th" sounds with the ESL teacher so I was glad to see that they all made the digrah correctly.
This would be a good time to go over multiple meaning words again with this group. (threw also). I also need to expose them to more silent "k" words.
At the end of the lesson, all the students said they had a lot of fun. I was hoping spelling test scores would have been better than they were. the scores ranged from 2/10 to 6/10. They usually have higher scores, but the words were more difficult this week.
I like the strong phonics connection you are observing from this behavior. Long u spelling patterns are so hard for them to get, especially when the ew pattern doesn't even have a u! I know you are doing multisensory, but you may want to try some word sorts as well. The blind sorts are really great at getting them to memorize which words follow which patterns. It would be awesome if we could find some way to make that multisensory!
ReplyDeleteNice reflection. It is unfortunate that EP has a negative impact on classmates. Does he/she have a behavior chart of some sort. I like how you have reflected on the number of words families that you introduced and how the amount of practice is impacting the performance. You mentioned that the words were harder this week... because of the vowel patterns?
ReplyDeleteJennifer- I do need to incorporate more word sorts. We just do one a week with our spelling words. I'm sure someone in my building has that book (I might even) because it was a focus point one year in Fayette County. It seems like it is making a great impact in your instruction.
ReplyDeleteMegan- The vowel pattern was more difficult, but I think having the digraphs and blends along with the vowel pattern was overwhelming for these students. I usually do another list for them, but just did one this week for everyone.