As my students begin to become more and more aware of letters and their sounds and sight words, they are becoming more comfortable with attempting to spell. It is happening slowly, and not every student is totally comfortable with it, but I wanted to share a few great and some concerning examples of student sentence writing.
I had given students 3 sight word cards with words that they are familiar with: "I", "go" and "here". In order to see if they could re-create the sentence "I go here", or one that was equally as grammatical. Most students produced the example that I had asked for and had drawn a picture to represent the place that represented "here". One student took this further and decided she would make that sentence and then create a sentence of her own with our other sight words that a are featured on our board.
She wrote: "I can go to the laibre." (I can go to the library.)
I thought this was quite exceptional of her and I asked her why she decided to write a second sentence after she had made "I go here" with the word cards. She said, "Because like, that is not hard enough, what you ask us to do first, Ms. Robb. I wanted to tell you where I can go to, not just draw it." It brought a big smile to my face.
Another great example of how students were using their invented spelling were the students who decided they would try to spell the name of the place they were going: "PRD CT" for "Party City", "scooule" for "school", "Trgt" for "Target" and so on and so forth. One of my favorites was: "Huhye" for "Hawaii".
However, I did witness and work with a student who had turned his "I" card sideways and was making the letter "H" with his card. When I asked him to read his sentence to me he said "I go here." Then I asked him to look at the alphabet chart and find I. He could not. Then I asked him to find the sight word "I" and when he did he was flipping it and saying "No, it don't matter, Ms. Robb, it don't, see!"
Then I told him, that it did matter how the letters looked because we would read the "I" differently if we wrote it the way he placed it. Then I asked him to read some more sight words on their side, without tilting his head. I reminded him that we read left to right and not up to down on a word to word basis.
Because of this experience, I know I will have to work closer and more explicitly with this students on concepts of print. Luckily he is in one of my Intervention groups and receives extra support from me along with 5 of his other classmates.
it sounds like through reflecting on these experiences you are developing your pedagogical content knowledge (e.g., understandings of how students learn and think about the specific materials, as well as the common misconceptions they might have). I would encourage to continue to document these learnings that you have, as they will serve as important data for your instruction in the future as well as important additions to a professional portfolio.
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