![]() ![]() There are many different ways that you can use this resource to help students practice reading sight words during the school day. ![]() If you need more support with teaching spelling and phonics to your K-2 students, help is on the way!! In 2020, I plan to release a new spelling and phonics program to help fill what I’ve observed to be a big need in our classrooms.Īnd in the meantime, check out my Boom learning digital phonics activities.6 Ways to Use Sight Word Readers in Kindergarten I don’t think so, but it all depends on how you use them! I can also give different groups of students different tests! (You can read more about differentiating your phonics / spelling instruction in THIS POST.) So…spelling tests aren’t “bad,” then?! So on a spelling test, I can ask them to spell some of our focus words, as well as a new word or two. I believe that they do! But not “traditional” spelling tests.Īfter I use the instructional practices described above, I need to see if students A) can spell the words we’ve been working on, and B) transfer that learning to spell NEW words with the same pattern. To learn more about what all this means, please read THIS POST about best practices in phonics and word study instruction! Do spelling tests have a place in the classroom? We also need to teach phonics systematically and explicitly.Īnd we need to make sure that our phonics instruction matches students’ needs-so differentiation is essential! (A “one size fits all” spelling test for the class does not accomplish this.) We need to teach phonics in the context of texts, as well as out-of-context (in isolation). We need to teach students those patterns, as well as how to use the patterns to read and write new words. ![]() English-though it’s a little nutty-is made up MOSTLY of words that follow patterns. We need to, first and foremost, help students recognize phonics patterns in words. What should I be doing instead of simply having kids memorize words? That’s another reason why spelling tests have gotten a bad reputation-because they (traditionally) were not differentiated. For some kids, the words were too difficult, and for other kids, the words were too easy. They don’t learn about patterns in words or how to generalize those patterns to spell other, similar words.Īlso, everyone in my class was given the same spelling list. They simply memorize the words for the spelling test and then promptly forget them. This way of learning words does NOT work for many students. This, I believe, is why spelling tests have gotten a bad reputation. We were just expected to memorize them-and that was that. We didn’t really do anything else with the words! We didn’t discuss phonics patterns, compare and contrast the words, or play games with them at school. The expectation was that we study (at home), and then we were tested on them on Friday. Sometimes the words were high frequency words or related to a science/social studies list. Sometimes there was a pattern to the words (like all long “o” words), but often not. ![]() This idea refers to “traditional” spelling tests, like the ones I took when I was growing up.Įach week, we had a list of words to memorize. Where does the idea that spelling tests are “bad” come from? ![]()
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