I confess: I used no spelling workbooks or weekly spelling
lists for an entire school year.
What happened? I noticed four
significant outcomes:
1.
My students learned to spell anyway. The class took the year-end
spelling test and scored nearly identically to the previous year’s class.
2.
We had 90 minutes more of literacy time without
taking the pre and post tests and weekly spelling study
time.
3.
Parents didn’t seem to mind. No one complained, but I send home a
newsletter article explaining, “spelling in third grade”.
4.
I decided never to go back to the canned
spelling program.
Why Do This?
After 30 years of running various spelling programs, it
struck me how much time these programs take up, and I didn’t see a huge
turnaround in spelling no matter what program I used.
Then I ran across some research in The Power of Reading by Stephen Krashen. His investigations indicated that students learn to spell
whether or not they receive instruction, and that students who read a lot, make
adequate gains in spelling. As
much as I respect Dr. Krashen, I could not have no spelling program at all.
Krashen’s findings got me looking at other research. I pondered some studies showing that
the most effective way to help students spell well was to provide
motivation. If students ached to
spell well, they would.
Personally
For years I struggled with the burden of being a poor
speller myself. Some teachers made
me feel dumb since I seemed to rapidly forget spelling words I had learned the
previous week. Since there are 40
sounds in the English language, and over 200 ways to spell them, I just didn’t
seem able to be able to keep track of them all. Bill Bryson, in his book The
Mother Tongue, gives this example: “there are 14 ways to spell the /sh/
sound: shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious, ocean, champagne, etc.”
Given all this, my spelling program consisted of these
elements:
1.
Lots of reading.
2.
Lots of writing.
3.
A weekly “published” piece of writing in the
style whichever author we were reading during Reading Instructional Time.
4.
Study of "hard" words as they came up
in our literature.
Since our class noticed that published writings have no
spelling errors, we decided when we studied an author and attempted to write
something like that person, we would spell everything correctly. Writing to publish provided my
class with the motivation to spell everything correctly. Sometimes this published piece was only
a few sentences, other times it was a whole essay.
Published Writing, in our class, means writing that goes up on the wall, the class web site, gets bound into a classroom book, or other ways of displaying student work. These are published and may not contain spelling errors.
Really Poor Spellers
I would also direct certain naturally poor spellers like
myself to study specific high-frequency words based on repeated errors. For example, Leonard would always
misspell the word friend. He also used that word weekly, so he really needed to learn
it. I met with him and explained
that he simply couldn’t get that word wrong any more. He and I figured out how to spell it, and he never
misspelled it the rest of the year.
Really Hard Words
Each day’s literacy lesson involved author studies. During this time we would examine how
our author tackled tricky spelling problems. For example, we noticed that Beverly Cleary always spells the possessive form of the word /thâr/,
t-h-e-i-r. We decided to spell this tricky word
just like our author.
That year I was so nervous about not doing a conventional
spelling program, I thought about spelling constantly. I really paid attention to the spelling
in my students’ weekly published work, my weakest students’ problems and the
really hard words we ran across in our Reading Instruction period. When we took that end-of-the-year test,
I noticed my fabulous spellers nailed it, my regular spellers did regular and
my struggling spellers struggled.
Just like last year.
What I also noticed was that nearly every student exceeded
on the reading test. Maybe all
that extra time for literacy made the difference.
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