Spelling+Assessment

Kelly Nolan Dr. McKool Monster Spelling Assessment March 8th, 2011 **  Introduction to Student    ** Jane is a very bright Kindergartener. She is in the highest level reading group in her class and she displays fluency in all of the math I have observed her in. She spends a lot of time reading in the morning and read to other students with great proficiency. I chose to do this assessment on this student because I know she is one of the brightest and I was under the impression that it would not frustrate her too much. She seemed to have no problems while she was participating in the assessment and she seemed to be very proud of herself when she was done. When it was over asked me repeatedly “did I do good?” to which I replied “you did wonderful.” **  Purpose of Assessment    ** In the classroom we are constantly assessing students to find out what they know and what they are still struggling with. When we know this we make differentiation much easier. We asses students spelling to what spelling level they are at and to find out what type of instruction they require to advance them through the different stages. This assessment shows us what level the students spelling represents and what that same spelling would look like in the next stage so that we know what we are working towards and you can plan your lessons accordingly. According to Bear et al in // Words Their Way // we need to “verify what types or orthographic features students have mastered and what types of features they are using but confusing”(pg 45). Bear also suggest that we need to do this assessment again and again throughout the year to see what kind of progress children are making (pg43). **  Methodology   ** For this assessment I used the Monster Test, created by Dr. J Richard Gentry. This assessment requires that you call out each word, read the sentence provided for the word and then call out the word again. I assured my student that she was not being graded and I simply wanted to see her make her best guess at how each word is spelled and I praised her every approximation. She seemed to be very receptive to this and during the test she seemed to be trying hard but she did not seem frustrated. When she was done I used the scoring guide on the last page of the assessment to categorize her spelling and although most of her spellings were not listed I was able to figure out from the spelling patterns she used which category each word belonged in. **  Findings    ** Jane seemed to be a very advanced speller for her age, most of her words fell in the transitional stage. According to Baer et al. (2008) children that range in ages from 7-10, Jane is not within that age range. Baer also says that students in this stage tend to omit or have trouble with ambiguous vowels and they also have trouble with words with long vowels and silent letters. In many of her words such as eagle, closed, bumped and hiked she omitted silent vowels. In words such as bottom and dress she incorrectly identified the doubled letter, in bottom she omits it and in dress she forgets and s but adds an e. In words such as human and typed she incorrectly identified the vowel sound, she used e instead of a in human and I instead of y in type. For the word united she heard the sounds u and nighted and she combined them. In my opinion she made very successful approximations of the spellings of all of these words and I was impressed with her spelling. She seemed to need to work on vowels and double consonants especially when it comes to the –ed suffix. These are things she probably has not learned yet but she will soon. **  How to Use These Findings    ** There are a few ways to use these findings. The first way would be during guided writing I could find a group of a few students who may be at or around the same level and do a minilesson on words that end in –ed and show many examples and explain the sounds that these words make. I could also so this for just her individually during a free writing time. Finally I could add a few words ending in –ed to the word wall and show the whole class words that end this way and know that some will understand and some will not. As for the double letter I would need to show her ways to really hear all of the letters in a word such a bot-tom. As far as dress this seems to me one of those words that you just need to remember so I would add that word and other words like it to the word wall to make spelling them much easier. Overall, Jane very much impressed me with her spelling ability. As I was watching her write the words she was saying the word to herself and stretching each sound out. I made sure to tell her that I thought this was a great strategy to use when spelling words we do not know. I was very surprised with how well she did, as I was expecting her to be in the Phonetic stage simply because of her age and grade.