I am working with 6 resource students with learning disabilities in middle school. They all have DIFFERENT spelling words they need to work on. I would love to have ideas on how to structure daily individual spelling practice!!! Also, I need ideas on how to assess each student at the end of the week without taking too much time. Obviously this isn’t as easy as handing out a workbook they can all work from and go over as a class together! Please help!!!
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Eileen Simpson, author of [i]Reversals: A Personal Account of Victory Over Dyslexia[/i] (1979), said much the same thing. She basically said that no amount of rewriting spelling words could help her learn to spell them correctly (she had to rewrite all misspelled words 50 times each, during the 6th grade), but that thorough training in phonics and the memorization of spelling rules would have helped her greatly. She did, in fact, know one spelling rule—the one regarding “i before e”—that enabled her to learn to spell “niece” correctly.
Kathy G.
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AMEN about copying spelling words. IT works for some of us.
I watched my students copy those words and it was lovely handwriting practice, but you could almost see the connection *not* happening. They just didn’t do the same thing in their minds; the connection between the sensory pathways (the audio & visual & kinesthetic) just isn’t happening with straight copying. I soon learned other ways.
When I was collecting stuff for LD ONLine for “teaching tips” I looked for a published version…. didn’t exist. NOw it does, at
http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/teachers/spelling_studying.html (I hold it dear to my heart… I think it was my first — of many — published piece of writing :-))
Re: [color=red]Ideas on teaching spelling?[/color]
If they come to your class with lists of spelling words from other teachers, you need to devise a strategy for them to learn spelling in general and have them apply it to the words on their lists. Set up a schedule of activities that you want them to do and have them follwo the schedule. Then you are more free to take them one at a time and review. If you have the freedom to use your own materials, may I suggest Looking Glass
Spelling. You can see a sample at www.gwhizresources.com. I’ll send you a personal message with more details.
Fern
The more I work on this, the more I am convinced that the great majority of spelling isues go back to poor phonics knowledge. Yes, the kids pass the absolute minimal standards, but they don’t know the more advanced patterns and they don’t really know how to apply the phonics to the real world.
If you look at students’ spelling errors, they can generally be categorized as wrong vowel patterns, omitted letters (occasionally bizarrely inserted letters), omitted syllables, and mushed order — all of which require improved phonics and a habit of tracking left to right in order to correct the problems. Studying word by word is a dead end because the next word is just going to have the same problems.
If you possibly can, you should get a book that reviews intermediate and advanced phonics, in particular digraphs and silent letter patterns, vowel patterns, word parts (prefixes, suffixes, verb endings, root words) and syllables, and work with all the students on this.
Then when it comes to the issue of particular words, you can analyze each student’s word lists with respect to the big picture — OK, this student needs to work on long and short vowels, this one needs to work on ed and ing endings and doubling the consonant before the vowel ending, and this one needs to pronounce all the syllables in the word and work on writing the sounds out in order. Once the students have the tools to break the words apart, they start to get into the speling system.