Week of March 15, 2010

This was a short week and I don't feel as if I had ample time to work on the study of this week's words.
We again began with the pretest. Prior to the test, I had the students write their words in their planners instead of doing so after the test. I am not sure if this helped any of the students with the words during the pretest.
I put the kids into partner groups for the word sort this week and it made a huge difference. I will continue with this practice changing up the partners each week.
On Wednesday, I met with each group and we discussed the word pattern(s) they were looking at. I again had them sort their lists, but I put a twist on it. They had to look for certain sounds, patterns, spellings, word meanings, etc. Whatever seemed most important to the group.
I would have liked another day to work with the words, but since we didn't have school on Friday, I had to have our post test on Thursday. Only a couple of my students didn't fare well on the weekly test. Taylor is just not interested in doing school work, she would rather socialize, so I don't know how many of the words she can truly spell or if she just doesn't care. My other student, Brett, is in the wrong group, I think. He was in my long vowel group, but after the quarter assessment using Words Their Way, I found that he may be able to handle a more challenging list of words. I am going to see how he does next week and then I may need to make some adjustments.