spelling for 6th grade

Yes, those are similar to the words my sixth grader
was asked to memorize and spell in four days, sometimes
three days.

After watching his stress level climb over the words
I contacted the teacher and asked that he be excused
from spelling.

My reasoning was, “Why are we wasting all this time
memorizing these words when he can’t even read them.
His reading level is 4.0. I can really use that time to
work with him at home on his reading skills.” (Currently, he does
not receive services at school - and that is a looong story).

The teacher agreed.
We still do vocabulary. We look up the words in a dictionary
and he uses them in sentences.

good luck,

Anne

I would agree that children should not be asked to spell words that they cannot yet read fluently. You can always add the modification to the IEP that the spelling list be reduced, eliminated, or substituted with a list more appropriate for the child’s reading level. I also agree with Anne that learning the word meanings would still be important especially if the teacher is pulling the words from subject area curriculum.

Janis

Is this common practice throughout the United States classrooms?

Sadly yes.
Teachers and schools feel pressured these day. They feel they are being criticized and they’ve responded by “turning up the heat”. Accused of not providing a good education, teachers and schools have turned to tests like these to appear as if they are offering excellence in education.

“Rigor” has become the by word of our schools. Every school wants to offer a “rigorous” curriculum. I find it an odd choice of words but everybody uses it. To me rigorous is the word that’s used when climbers barely survive an Everest climb. Why do we use it in our schools with young children? Is it really what we want?

These spelling words reflect the modern preoccupation with “rigor” in schools. They’re rigorous words. That they’re also ridiculous ones for any 6th grader to be learning to spell isn’t usually considered.

Not every child has a parent who recognizes this. Your daughter is fortunate to have you.

I’d have had little trouble because so many of those words have so much in common (the “phys” and the “bio) and enough of them are pretty regular… but spelling was easy for me, and I had good solid reading instruction in elementary school. It’s really inappropriate for your dd to waste time she could be *learning* and *using* language, doing the busy work of pretending to learn to spell those words. Work on the vocab and give that part *extra* time, and bag the spelling (assuming they’re vocab. at an appropriate level for her). Even if the school folks don’t go along with it and flunk her on every spelling test, it’s not going on her transcript — nobody is going to not hire her or accept her in a college based on her sixth grade spelling grade. She can pick one hard word to learn to spell right just for fun. (Okay, I’m feeling a little rebellious today ;))

This is very typical for spelling for my sixth grade daughter. (She actually has much more arcane words for vocabulary). She does fine with it frankly but she isn’t LD. Now she has this great tendency to forget everythng she learned to spell last week with the result that she isn’t a great speller in practice but that is another story.

In other words, I think it is the LD that is causing the problem. My LD 3rd grader is totally excused from regular classroom spelling. He isn’t capable yet of doing grade level spelling and to pretend he is only wastes everyone’s time. I basically told the school this and noone has given me any grief. Now he is in resource room for reading and language arts so that makes it easier.

Beth

These are reasonable words for an *advanced* sixth grader, ie someone who is reading on grade level or above and moving ahead and who has no serious LD’s. Except for the cian in “politician”, these are all quite regular phonetically and there is little difficulty learning to spell them by sound IF you have a good phonics base, the only question being to remember ph versus f. If you have a moderate to severe LD or if you were not taught phonics, then these would be impossible.
This is actually a good place to do some phonics review and reteaching.
I agree, if your daughter has LD problems and is working hard on other skills, don’t worry abnout the spelling grades. Just use the words to review sound-spelling patterns as well as meanings (and do be careful about dictionary definitions, which may be misleading and confusing), and let the test fall out as it may.

One thing I don’t like about the way spelling instruction is carried out at most schools is that almost all children end up with the same spelling list. At my children’s school, they have a pretest on the basic words to see if they know them or not. If a child misses one or no words, they are given a harder, challenge list.

This does not take into account what spelling level a child is at. Although I do not agree with much of the content Words Their Way, the spelling levels make some sense. My 2nd grader is learning long vowel and vowel diagraph and dipthong patterns — called within word in Words Their Way. When her spelling words are at one level higher (when she receives the challenge words), she is not solidifying the patterns, she is having to do much more than that. She is not LD that I know of, though.

My older daughter (who is getting help from the school and received a D in spelling last quarter) has a reduced spelling list. Unfortunately, that does not always mean that the words are easier. I talked to her teacher about that and it does seem to be changing. I don’t think she should be studying any words from the challenge list if she misses more than one word on the basic list. Most of the time she misses most of the basic words on the pretest.

Anyway, if your daughter still has difficulty spelling long vowel patterns, etc. than I think the list you spoke of is way over her head. There is also a “stage” of spelling called syllable juncture (Words Their Way) that encompasses how syllables come together, including consonant doubling, e-drop, stressed and unstressed (schwa) syllables. This should also come before the words you listed.

Good luck,

Margo

Spelling words for sixth grade: physician, physical, economy, politician, democracy, athlete, astronomy, microscope, hexagon, biography, biology, telephone, (abundance, charitable, currency, destitute, emerge, finale, infuriated, mortal, pledge, procession, provision, reassurance, solitude, surplus, and welfare.

These are probably about the norm. The rub here is that spelling is developmental and if your student is functioning at a lower developmental level, there’s no way she’s going to be able to handle these. However, if you help her break them down into syllables and work out the spellings of each syllable, she’ll come a lot closer to getting them correct — a-bun-dance, cha-ri-ta-ble, cur-ren-cy, des-ti-tute, e-merge, fi-na-le, in-fur-i-a-ted, mor-tal, pro-ces-sion, pro-vi-sion, re-a(uh)-su-rance. sol-i-tude, sur-plus, wel-fare.

Try to get a copy of the 2001 Annals of Dyslexia. It contains an excellent article by Bob Schlagel entitled, “Traditional, Developmental, and Structured Language Approaches to Spelling: Review and Recommendations” (pp. 147-176). He writes about different approaches to spelling instruction and reaffirms that children can’t spell longer words if they can’t succeed at lower levels. I keep wondering WHEN the knowledge gained through the spelling research of the last 20 years is going to filter down to the classroom. Old ways die hard.

You remind me of a story I read: Max Braithwaite (well-known Canadian author, wrote “Why Shoot the Teacher?” about his experiences teaching in a one-room school in the northern Canadian prairies during the Depression — also “Never Sleep Three in a Bed” and “The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car”) wrote, as he put it, of the school system’s attempts to destroy his brother Hub (Hubert). Apparently Hub had either some sort of LD or else could not deal with the memorization system then in place. Hub was doing OK on reading and had progressed to Grade 5 or 6, but could not spell at all. His teacher had failed him in spelling but had passed him on otherwise. Then the family moved to a larger city and a larger and more formal school.The new teacher discovered Hub’s spelling deficit, ignored his reading and math skills, and horrified, took him to the principal who finally put him back in the Grade 1 class. Hub of course was mortified, a twelve-year-old being publicly embarrassed and put back in Grade 1. He became a Grade 6 dropout, not an uncommon thing in the 1920’s, but not what his middle-class family expected. Luckily he had enough personal strength and family support that he didn’t give up on himself and had a successful life and career, but not thanks to that teacher and the principal who supported her.

Point of this story: most spelling “teaching” has not changed at all since that time. In fact, if anything, it’s gotten worse. At least in the 1920’s the spelling lists for each grade were published (I have copies of some) so it wasn’t a mystery what you were supposed to study. The system of copy, memorize, and copy again, reciting by letter names, is the same now as it was then. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now. But ingrained habits are hard to change — you’re supposed to have a spelling list to memorize every week, and as a teacher I was bitterly criticized for not sending a list home — the fact that my classes spelled better than average had nothing to do with it, you have to memorize a list so you can then forget it again to do the next.