Well, here I am blogging, writing a post, so I can receive comments and be excited about what other people think of what I write or the topic I write about. I cant believe I am spending my Sunday afternoon expressing what I feel and think in a blog. My own blog....
Maybe I should have titled this post "Working on Words", relating it to the Daily 5 that we are all working so hard on implementing in our classrooms. I am "Working on putting words together" in this post, or is that just the same as "Working on Writing"?
I recently read an article about spelling - why some kids cant spell and why spelling tests wont help.
In the beginning I was horrified to read that the activities I have my children do to practise their spelling does not actually teach spelling: look cover write check, looking for small chunks, words within words etc. But as I read on I became more interested in what spelling teaching should look like.
Finding meaning in words is important, not just memorising a string of letters. That sounds are important but so are the morphemes in words. The example the article used was the word “jumped”. It has two morphemes - “jump” and “ed”. We can understand the meaning of “Jump”, but “ed” is also meaningful because it tells us that the jump happened in the past. It goes on to suggest that when assisting kids to spell words we should ask "what does this word mean" rather than "what sounds can you hear".
So, to develop a love of words, stories about words, meanings of words, will assist in teaching kids how to spell. Interesting concept. As part of the daily 5 we teach the kids to "tune into interesting words". Perhaps this can now become a part of our "Work on Words", linking reading to writing to spelling...
