Blog 7-Effective Word Work

    After the article discussion on Thursday I began to ponder how I could apply the details from the articles in my own practice.  The discussion of my article entitled, Using Curriculum-Based Measurement for Struggling Beginning Writers made me think of how I could grade writing in my own classroom.  As many things go in teaching, it is on my "later to do list" but I mentioned the CBM to my team and they said they have done things like that before and it really does work.  They agreed that there really isn't a consistent, formal way to grade writing but there should be.  Classmates said having work samples in the "Words Their Way" program is helpful, and giving a word bank to struggling writers is effective, so I can relay those messages to my team and try them out in my classroom!  That was not enough to satisfy my need to reach my young readers and writers though, so I took some salient ideas from Jamie's article on word work.
      Much talk of words their way came about during Jamie's article discussion, and I love the idea of doing a pretest with the spelling pattern, and whoever got 100% would get harder words.  My team is re-working the way we differentiate reading by organizing differentiated homework and sight word testing, but spelling is still under debate.  As a first grade teacher I could definitely see the pretest/posttest idea working because that is how math is structured, and it is a big motivator for growth.  I was also intrigued by the article on word study. 
       Being it is my first year in first grade I knew I had to have a word wall, but I was unclear about exactly how to use it.  In the start of the year I had every word we wrote down from our review of alphabet words, to words with the short vowels in it.  I was using index cards but that got very messy-looking, so I color-coded the words based on their pattern, but kids were still not really using all the words in their writing.  After the discussion in class I realized that all the words on the wall should be words kids can write and use, so I took down the words unused and only left up simple CVC words, and sight words.  Now I can hold students more accountable, and I have taken a few minutes each day to advise students on how to use the word wall.  Also, something else I incorporated from our discussion that worked was explicitly teaching writing during the morning message by having different kids write different sentences in the morning message while the other kids sounded out the words on their arm to help the writer.  We could discuss invented spelling, finger spaces, and punctuation which has made a notable change in their awareness of the conventions of writing!