Joke stove hot rock some
hope home chop come
those broke clock
hose rode pot
hole cone spot
rope rose job
Caitlin’s written word sort this week was perfect again. She completed this activity
independently so there was no way to confirm whether Caitlin used her word cards to spell these words or if she was able to do so completely independently. What can be surmised was that Caitlin was able to locate both oddballs without prompts from the teacher.
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In class we had learned about informational writing. Caitlin’s writing was all about flowers. The first observation made about this writing piece was that it was very short in length. During our writer’s workshop time we had studied mentor texts by National Geographic, Gail Gibbons, and many others. During the reading of these mentor texts we studied the illustrations and text features that were employed by these authors. During this sample, Caitlin was very focused on her illustration and labels. This may have been the cause of the shorter writing piece. The writing in this piece was interesting for a number of reasons. I could tell that Caitlin was really attempting to encode long vowel patterns when she heard them. This was evident in her illustrations when she labeled the flower “lielocks” attempting to spell the word “lilacs.” This was a wonderful approximation of the word “lilacs”, and showed that she was truly focused on hearing and encoding the long vowel sounds. Caitlin heard the long vowel “i” and attempted to use either a vowel team or the CVCe pattern. Either way, this was evidence that she was attempting these unknown long vowel words. Another word Caitlin attempted to encode was “wild” spelled
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“willed.” As she did in the previous week’s writing sample, Caitlin knew there was a long vowel sound but was unsure how to encode that word so she attempted an alternate spelling by doubling the “l” in “wild.”
Caitlin completed five sentences this week and completed them in the same manner as she had been, using two words per sentence with accuracy. Two sentences shed light on some areas of improvement for Caitlin. Those sentences were:
“I choped up vegatebls and put them in a pot.” “I hope those kid do it.”
These sentences showed evidence that Caitlin was ready to learn about adding endings where the consonant needed to be doubled dependent on short or long vowels. This skill focus is embedded in the Syllables and Affixes stage of spelling, which is the next stage of spelling. For Caitlin’s second sentence it was surprising to see that she had some structural issues using plural “s.” This was not common for Caitlin and therefore leads me to believe that this probably had more to do with her tendency to rush and not monitor or reread her finished product. This was evidence that although Caitlin was improving in her ability to self monitor previously, she still had room for improvement.
Words Their Way incorporates various literacy activities (Bear et al., 2008). This variety of
activities often provided insight to what the student was working toward. Week four’s activities showed that Caitlin was gaining confidence in her spelling of long vowel words but that she still had areas in which to improve. Through these activities it was shown that Caitlin did not seem to be rereading or checking over her work after completion. Although this was not the main goal of
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instruction, it offered information that helped to tailor Caitlin’s instruction. During her word sorting, Caitlin continued to work with patterns to solidify her understandings as well as practice breaking words by their onset and rime in order to segment the vowel sounds when needed. By including oddballs into the word sort, Caitlin was able to identify that not all words will fit every pattern she was taught. Working with words like “come” and “some” while sorting for short and long “o”, Caitlin was able to identify that while these words fit the pattern being studied they do not have the correct vowel sound and as such needed special attention. The activities completed provided insight for me as well as for Caitlin.
Week 5-May 12, 2014
During week five Caitlin worked on long and short vowel “u”, the last vowel sound used with the CVCe pattern. At this point in the study Caitlin was showing control over this pattern and was even working to include known vowel teams into her writing. However, this was a challenging word sort because long vowel “u” can make two different sounds those being /yoo/ (the letter name) and /oo/ like in the word “boot.“ During the initial word sort instruction and modeling we compared the word “cute” and “tube” to demonstrate these different sounds. Students were told that even though they make a slightly different sound they are spelled in the same way using the CVCe pattern. On the first day that we met each week students were given the words to cut out and sort this being the only task they were required to finish that day. Caitlin showed amazing growth during this word sort. At first Caitlin was thrown by the different sounds long “u” can make and found the sort a little challenging for the first words sorted but as she remained determined she excelled with this sort while many other students struggled. Caitlin was able to
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verbally break apart words and at times was even drawing a line separating the onset and rime on her word cards. The oddball was “put” and Caitlin was able to quickly identify it as such.
During the course of this study Caitlin was encouraged to monitor her work and to use the classroom supports in order to help her refrain from forming bad habits. With this in mind, Caitlin needed to be formally assessed on whether she was correctly using the spelling pattern CVCe for long vowel sounds in words. For Caitlin’s written word the words were read aloud to her while she attempted to encode the words given. As we concluded instruction working with this long vowel pattern, I needed to decide whether she was ready to move on to other word study skills or if she needed additional time with the CVCe pattern. A re-creation of Caitlin’s word sort was as follows: