SarahGoodwin_Journal1

====I normally visit my third grade classroom placement at Glen Hills Elementary School in Cranston on Wednesdays, but this week it was snowing on Wednesday and I went on Friday instead. On Friday mornings the students in the class always take a spelling pretest to establish a list of words to study for the upcoming week’s spelling test. The words come from a literacy curriculum book that is used by all third grade classrooms at Glen Hills. The words on the list are all related and follow a spelling rule or set of rules. This week all the words were irregular plurals. It included words such as “scarves,” “tomatoes,” and “women.”==== ====The teacher reads a list of fifteen words with accompanying context sentences to the whole class, and the students do their best to spell each word correctly. After they have completed the pre-test, the teacher collects the pre-test. Before the day is over, she grades the tests and creates an individualized list of words for each student. The list is usually about 10 words long. The individualized list includes the words that each student spelled incorrectly on the pre-test. In the literacy book, there is a list of “challenge words” next to each pre-test. If the students spell more than five words correctly on the pre-test, the teacher adds enough “challenge words” to each list to have ten words on each student’s list. Before the end of the day the teacher has prepared an individualized spelling list for each child for the upcoming week.==== ====I think that this is a very effective way of doing spelling tests. It is a good way to handle the different levels of spelling ability in the classroom. Some students get most of the words wrong on the pre-test, and need to study those words. At the same time there are some students who spell most of the words correctly on the pre-test and study the challenge words for the next week’s test. The level of individualization helps each student to learn spelling at his or her own pace. I think it would be harder to apply this concept to other types of tests, but it works well for the spelling tests.====