Literacy - C14 - Winter Quarter - Week 2

Templeton and Morris: What aspects of spelling instruction mentioned in this article do you see playing out in your placement? Pick one aspect to describe and discuss how it works with kids.

One of the disadvantages of having my main placement in an upper elementary class (5th/6th), as well as in a gifted student program, is that I see relatively little spelling being taught in the classroom, since the assumption is that gifted kids at that level already should be pretty good spellers, and for the most part this assumption is true. However, I do notice that there are several students who could use some of the instruction set forth in the Templeton/Morris article.

One of the problems I have noticed is that some of the more gifted kids seem to rely more heavily on computers to do their assignments, and of course they have grown accustomed to defaulting to spellcheck on their word documents. This becomes most evident in a comparison to students' handwritten work and their "typed" work. What I find interesting is that many of the more difficult words are spelled correctly on their typed work, but that certain "easy" words are misspelled or misapplied, mainly because the words themselves aren't technically misspelled, but are used incorrectly (e.g., there for their). Also words that get spelled correctly on the computer-generated work are routinely misspelled in handwritten work for some students.

Again, the problem is that the curriculum for a 5th/6th grade advanced class doesn't really have room for spelling, and my mentor teacher has neither the time nor inclination to teach spelling (since, admittedly, it is only a fraction of the students that require it). What I would love to see happen is to have a small breakout group of the inferior spellers be given explicit teacher-directed instruction, as recommended in the article on p. 108-109, with the emphasis on
pattern, and the exploration of derivational patterns. The kids in my class generally have good vocabulary, but are constantly trying to expand and improve it, and some of the instructional activities associated with patterns, as set forth in the article, would undoubtedly prove most useful. The strategy of reasoning by analogy would also work extremely well for the majority of the class when it comes to spelling unfamiliar words, which many of them encounter daily in their readings (although they are very well trained in looking up words in a dictionary, which only gets you so far if you understand patterns in the first place).

Also, as a side note, my DYAD placement was in a language arts class at a junior high school, and by and large, their spelling was atrocious! However, they were even more reliant on computer spell checks then elementary school kids, and attempting to teach spelling after sixth grade seems to be an abandoned cause.