Fox Entry 9, Spelling Strategies and Variation

 For this week's class, session 10, we had a deeper dive discussion focused on the Tompkins chapter, Learning to Spell, and an article by Amanda C., titled Connecting Developmental Word Study with Classroom Writing: Children's Descriptions of Spelling Strategies. Both of these readings allowed insight into how children learn to spell and what is beneficial for them during this learning process and what is not. The article discusses how they conducted a research study and interviewed students to see what children would tell them about their strategies for spelling and to gain insight into connections between spelling instruction and writing. The study included fifteen teachers across three elementary schools. Tompkins provides strategies for spelling for children and instructional methods for teaching spelling that teachers can use. While conducting the research study, the researchers found that children used multiple techniques and that these strategies differed across the developmental stages. I was intrigued to read and learn about the five developmental stages of spelling and how we should differentiate the process we use to teach spelling and provide various techniques for the children. I had never heard of interviewing students to find out about their learning and how they are learning, especially not in spelling. During these interviews, students looked at a current piece of writing, circled difficult words, and discussed strategies for figuring out how to spell the word. Each method was coded, and the researchers created a figure for the spelling strategies. Within the figure, the strategies used were visualizing, remembering words from books, picturing words, trying alternatives, making connections, focusing on sounds, reflecting, and combining information. This allows educators to see that we can not use a "one size fits all" strategy for teaching spelling. We should encourage students to use techniques that make the most sense for them and allow them to do derivation relations spelling, stage five of spelling development.

 

If we want all of our students to be successful in reading and writing, they need to be good at spelling. It is crucial to their spelling development to allow them to use multiple strategies to identify and decode words that may be unfamiliar as they are learning to spell. We must provide students with the tools to become fluent spellers and remember that one strategy may only work for some students. The article also discusses how strategies will shift and change as children move through the different developmental stages of spelling. They discuss how when students move out of the emerging steps. Into the higher level developmental period, they shift from sounding it out and thinking like chunking into making connections to reading. I found this interesting because students no longer depend on sounding it out because they know all the sounds that letters make and can identify spelling patterns. Hence, they then make connections when they see a new word to something they may have seen or read in the past. The researchers also noticed that children use original ways of working and combining information to figure out tricky spellings and that this was encouraged. When I was learning how to spell, I was taught to sound it out or use the dictionary and was not encouraged to use other strategies like the children involved in this study. As a future educator, I want to encourage and teach my students to use multiple methods for spelling so that they have various tools that can help them and so that they can become successful in spelling and their overall literacy development.