Ignite Your Teaching
Ignite Your Teaching
Ep 259 - Enhancing Spelling Skills: Transitioning to Ignited Spelling in the Junior Classroom
What if your students could effortlessly understand spelling patterns and rules, and not just memorize words for a test? What if you, as an educator, could transition smoothly away from traditional worksheets to an engaging and comprehensive spelling program? That's exactly what we're tackling in today's episode. We're voyaging through the fresh and comprehensive approach of teaching spelling to juniors using Ignited Spelling. We expose the gaps in foundational skills due to lack of explicit instruction and offer strategies to fill these voids, building on the knowledge your students already possess.
We also roll up our sleeves to dive into the tricky task of integrating ignited spelling with ignited literacy. We acknowledge that the pace of each classroom differs and hence, the incorporation of ignited spelling into ignited literacy may not always be smooth. Fear not, we've got your back! We unfold a weekly plan for ignited spelling which teases off with an intriguing inquiry hook and is sprinkled with components like a spelling zoo anchor chart, shared reading, and practice pages. We ensure that by the end of this enlightening episode, you will be equipped with a better understanding of how to transition to ignited spelling lessons seamlessly.
We wind up with the nitty-gritty details of a weekly practice plan. We unfurl effective techniques to assess student progress and discuss how to form a spelling list, summarize the text, provide instruction, and evaluate students. We shine the spotlight on the 12 available activities for spelling centers and offer tips on their best utilization. We parse the must-do activities and guide you when and how to collect assessment data. No matter if you're an educator or a parent, this episode is brimming with valuable insights and strategies to level up your teaching game and help your students ace their spelling skills!
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The way we've teach spelling has changed and we're not doing spelling tests anymore, and it is certainly not the kill and drill memorization that we have been used to over the last many years. So how exactly are we going to help junior students from grades 3 to grade 6 build their spelling skills? Well, we're going to talk all about how to build junior grade level spelling skills using ignited spelling. So first, what's the problem? Well, the first thing is we have a new curriculum and it is asking us, in this new curriculum, to teach spelling and vocabulary skills much differently than we have in the past. We're using a structured literacy or science of reading approach, and this has changed how we build spelling skills with students. The problem here is that right now, because of this transition, our current students in the grades 3 to 6 range have no foundational skills in which to build grade level content upon, and without these skills being developed, we are at a bit of a loss, because we not only have to teach them grade level content, but they have to have the knowledge and the vocabulary of some of these foundational skills before we can build upon it. Now it is not like they don't have any skills at all, because for a lot of our students. They have developed some of this knowledge of how to spell words correctly, understanding the sounds letters make when they're put in combination with others. They've learned these skills but they've learned them without being directly taught them. So they're missing some of the ways that we talk about it and it's going to be really hard to build upon these skills, teaching things like complex blends and open syllables, closed syllables, digraphs, diphthongs. They won't know any of that vocabulary but forget for some of our students. We definitely need to be teaching them the mechanics here of this word knowledge. So we're going to have to kind of go back and give students the vocabulary and the understanding of how language is put together so they can make sense of the knowledge they're not even aware of in their head Now many of the times these skills that have been developed without that explicit instruction.
Patti Firth:We kind of have to do a bit of a hybrid model here. We have to give them some of that explicit instruction and have them put the knowledge on top of the things they already know, because it's okay right now. If there are some gaps in learning, it's to be expected that they're would be gaps in student learning when it comes to spelling and grammar. Now that doesn't necessarily mean we've got to go all the way back to a grade one level and cover grade one, grade two, grade three, all the way up to grade six content in the span of one academic year. They probably don't need to go all the way back and review things at the same pace to say a grade one student would need to do. We can probably go through some of those foundational skills a little bit differently so that we can build upon what they need to know now.
Patti Firth:So what exactly is different? Well, first off, we are not focusing on spelling tests, where there is a focus on memorization. This is the memorization of specific words and how you spell specific words. You can still do spelling tests, but the focus here is not going to be on memorizing the word, more so on understanding and knowing the rule, the pattern or the concept that's being taught and how they apply it to words that fit in that category. So if you are using a spelling test and we are simply giving students a list of words asking them to simply memorize that single solitary word and regurgitate it on a test at the end of the week, this is what we are no longer working on.
Patti Firth:It's not the effective way that we are going to teach students how to spell. It relies on the idea and concept that students will learn how to spell just by memorizing more words. But it is not really the most effective way because there are so many words in the English language, it's going to be impossible for students to memorize the spellings of all words. Instead, there are much fewer patterns and concepts that students can learn and know and the rules that they follow. So when students learn the rules instead of memorizing the single word, they have a better chance of the generalized knowledge and how it applies to words that they may encounter later on, so new words. So if they know how to spell cat, then they should know how to apply that same pattern to lots of other words with a short a sound.
Patti Firth:If they hear a long a sound, like in tail, they will understand that the long a sound is made by a few combinations of letters. It could be a magic e or a bossy e. It could be a vowel team. There's different ways that a long a sound is made. If we understand what a short a sound looks like, we understand what a long a sound looks like we're not necessarily memorizing how to spell each word that has a long a or each word that has a short a, but when we can generalize the understanding of the pattern, it's going to give our students a much better strategy to rely on. That's less content for them to memorize and more patterns that they can begin to recognize when they're spelling. So no more spelling tests and less of a focus on memorization of single words and more on understanding the patterns.
Patti Firth:We also aren't going to simply rely on a worksheet. In the past we've always had spellers or we've had access to spellers, or that's really been the program. We give a list of words, then we give some worksheets that have students go through the motions of completing tasks and, granted, some of those worksheets did cover spelling rules and spelling patterns, but what was often missing was explicit instruction given and provided by the teacher to students about that spelling rule or pattern. So this is where we're going to move a little bit away from these wrote, kill and drill type worksheets for spelling and we're going to move more into the application type worksheets where we really are going to get our students thinking and applying the things we teach them explicitly in a whole group lesson and we want to see the activities they're completing being an application or thinking skill and less of a knowledge and understanding type of task that is done independently.
Patti Firth:Now, for teachers, this may feel very new. It's probably not at all how we learned as students and it doesn't really reflect anything that we have naturally been doing at the junior grade levels for a very long time. So if you're at the point where this is feeling very new, you're feeling like a fish out of water. That's totally normal. It is okay to feel like that when new things are coming at us. I felt the same way when they introduced how to teach math using multiple strategies. It felt new, it felt uncomfortable, but over time, as I introduced that slowly into my classroom, I got more and more used to how to teach math in a different way.
Patti Firth:The same is going to be said for spelling. There's a lot of crossover here between how we are now teaching math and how we are teaching spelling. So, looking at what's new here, we are focusing on the spelling skills, rules and patterns in our classroom and less on the memorization and rote learning. We're going to focus on morphology and really highlighting the patterns and structure in the building blocks of language for our students to focus on, not simply just memorization and spelling. We're also going to work on making sure that spelling is going to be taught in a meaningful context. So we want to embed that spelling is really that bridge between both reading and writing, that the things that they need to do to spell words correctly will assist them in their writing, but it also is a reflection of their reading skills. It really is going to be the glue that holds that reading and writing together.
Patti Firth:So we want to make sure that our spelling lessons are connected and help students see the context and connection between what we're doing in reading and what we're doing in writing in our classroom. And we want to make sure that we have explicit lessons where there is teacher directed teaching, the rules, having students practice those rules in multiple different ways. So let's talk a little bit more about how we are teaching it. So one the first thing we're going to do is teach spelling in the context of a weekly shared reading activity and combine this lesson with vocabulary. So we want students to see these words and these word patterns not just on a sheet. That's related to spelling, but we also want to see it in their reading. So we're going to embed the lesson within a weekly shared reading text and tie it into some of the vocabulary that we're going to be able to pull out of that text.
Patti Firth:The next piece of the puzzle here is we're going to have an explicit lesson. This is going to be a teacher led, teacher directed lesson where we are going to go over the specific pattern of spelling, their rules as well as morphology of the various vocabulary words that we're encountering. And third is we want and third is we want to provide students with hands-on practice so that they can take what we've taught them in the explicit lesson. They can take the learning that we applied as pulling out some of those words that match that spelling pattern from that shared reading text. We want to provide students with hands-on practice where they are really focusing on the application and thinking skills and not simply just on the knowledge and understanding. There are pieces where we want to have the knowledge and understanding components, those basic skills. We want to make sure that that's there, but we really want to focus some of this independent time on those higher-order thinking skills as it's related to spelling. Now, this inside of ignited literacy, the ignited spelling components where we have a shared reading, we have the explicit lesson and we have the hands-on practice this replaces within the original ignited literacy package. This replaces the shared reading, the spelling lesson as well as the spelling center. So ignited spelling here is a component that will be replacing those three pieces within the ignited literacy program itself.
Patti Firth:Now a question is well, why did you not update the original ignited literacy to add in ignited spelling lessons? So there's a few reasons for that. First, because the curriculum has changed. It has introduced these huge gaps in the knowledge for junior students. So the reality is what is happening here is students are lacking the background knowledge to do the grade level content, so there's a bit of gap closing. That's going to need to happen right now.
Patti Firth:If we were to have embedded ignited spelling into each package of ignited literacy, it wouldn't accurately reflect where students are, with the knowledge that every classroom across the country, across the province, is going to need to work through some of these spelling skills at a much different pace than they're able to work through the ignited literacy program. So you're working at two different paces here and you may take a couple of weeks to finish an ignited spelling lesson, whereas you're able to go through the ignited literacy lesson, depending on where you need to start, based on your students, and where you need to finish. You're going to be moving through these two programs at a much different pace. So if we were to embed the ignited spelling into the current ignited literacy, then what would happen is you would be moving too quickly and not responsibly enough to your students' needs. So each classroom is going to need to work through their spelling, vocabulary, morphology, skills at much different paces and it's not going to reflect the same pace you're going to be able to work through ignited literacy. Your path through ignited literacy will be at a much different speed than ignited spelling. Well, we will eventually integrate these two pieces together so you will see when to do an ignited spelling lesson and when to do an ignited literacy lesson. At this point we have not yet integrated those until we receive some feedback and understanding of how this is working in classrooms.
Patti Firth:Now, what does that look like as you're looking for your weekly plan? Now, typically, as we designed ignited literacy, ignited literacy's plan always started with a read aloud. At the beginning of the week, there was teacher directed writing lessons. There's already a grammar lesson, some oral comprehension and shared reading. So, as we are transitioning, what we have suggested is that you traditionally take the Friday lesson that is in your ignited literacy program and you swap that out and put it first. This is going to allow you on Monday to do your ignited spelling lessons and then continue Tuesday through Friday with your regular ignited literacy components. So if you do your ignited spelling activities on the first day of the week, there are two ignited spelling lessons. You do those on the first day of the week and then you continue following the plan for ignited literacy, removing one shared reading lesson and removing the spelling lesson from the end of the week. You will be able to get through all of your content.
Patti Firth:Now, what exactly is in the weekly plan for ignited spelling? So we start each weekly plan with an inquiry hook. Now we want to engage students in their learning. We want to have them bring up some of their past experiences and activate that prior knowledge. So we're always going to start our spelling lessons with a prompt, a problem or a question. That's going to activate their knowledge, get their brains working and get them thinking about what the rule or pattern could be about.
Patti Firth:Next we're going to help and assist students to uncover the rule and look for the pattern. Now this is a really key, important component. We don't necessarily want to just tell students what the rule is. We do want them to see if they can see it and uncover the pattern through some of the examples we're giving them within that question or prompt. Now the reason we want to do that is going to be a few different reasons. We want students to be able to recognize that really the English language is full of patterns that we want them to be able to see and rules, and we want to see that it's not just random and it's not just haphazard, that things are organized and do have make sense if we understand how things are constructed. So we want them to begin to look for those patterns and rules Once we can help them recognize. Now this may take time and we may have to make it really obvious and point it out and give them lots and lots of clues and hints. But once they've uncovered the rule, it's then time to teach their explicit lesson.
Patti Firth:Each week of ignited spelling includes a spelling zoo anchor chart which will go over the syllable rules or go over the rules of the pattern that is being taught that week. Now the next step is going to be the shared reading. Now, this is where we're going to be able to embed the spelling skills inside to a text as well as use this as a shared reading to pull out for summarization, reading for meaning, as well as good vocabulary words that will help us build some more fall morphologic knowledge. But we want to be able to have students read the text they're going to read it for meaning and understanding and be able to summarize the text. Then we want them to identify some challenging vocabulary words, specifically words that we might highlight for them so that they understand which words are going to be focused on. This is going to be tied to the morphology rule and challenge that we are going to be focusing on for the lesson for the week. Then we're going to find exemplar words that match our spelling pattern. So we've just uncovered the spelling pattern in the first part of the lesson.
Patti Firth:The second part of the lesson is we're not only going to read this text and read it for reading purposes, finding vocabulary, but we're also going to look for words that fit the spelling pattern that we're focusing on. We're going to create a list of 10 words, 10 exemplar words. Now it's important to note that these are exemplar words. They're not the only words students will work with, but these are the example words that fit the pattern. So we're going to, together with students, find example words from the text. We're going to make a list of them and we're going to pick 10 of them. Now it's important that this could be co-created. Within ignited spelling will give you a sample of 10 words that you could use, but please feel free to always use extra words or words your students find that they may find meaningful. It's often more meaningful when you co-create this, even if it's false co-creating, because you already know what words you want to use, but you want students to be involved in that activity and have some input in the words you select as your exemplar words for each week.
Patti Firth:Next up is going to be the weekly plan practice pages. Now this practice page is photocopied front and back, so the students have one page per week and there's a variety of activities on this page. The purpose of this page is to not only do it independently there are parts that can be done independently but there's also parts that can be done at the end of a whole group lesson, where everybody is assigned a task and they all do it the same thing at the same time. So it's not part of the centers, but it is a task they're doing independently. It can also be done as group work or as a whole class lesson, depending on where you are and what you need to focus on. But in this weekly practice plan, students will be reviewing the rules of the lesson. They'll be completing whole group activities for practice as well as reviewing centers activities and independent assessment pieces.
Patti Firth:On your weekly practice plan there's a few different parts I would like to highlight. So for the first part is going to be your spelling list. This is where your 10 exemplar words will go for the week, after you pull them out of the shared reading text. Together with your students. You're going to co-create this list or simply use the one, provided that's within ignited spelling. The next piece is going to be the rules. You want students not only to see the rules on an anchor chart, but you do want them to write the rules out in their own paper. So we want them to copy down the rules for that spelling ruler pattern right in their weekly practice page so that they can embed that knowledge in their own brains as they're writing. They can write it in their own words, in their own understanding, or they can simply copy the anchor chart that you create or show them.
Patti Firth:And finally, on the front page, is the vocabulary. You will select four to five challenge words. I like to pick four words and then have students select the fifth word. These words are going to go here in this first column of the practice plan. Each week the practice plan activity may be slightly different. This is typically going to be done not as an independent task, but teacher directed whole group, so you will explain to students what they do and then provide all students time to complete it. At the same time, at the end of one of your teacher directed lessons, you are going to allow students to extend their understanding with this vocabulary. And again, this is not going to be part of a center's task. Occasionally, this can be collected and assessed and can be used for assessment information. However, I would recommend that you are not doing that every single week.
Patti Firth:On the back of the page there are a few components for students to do After reading the shared reading text. There is a place that students can summarize the text, summarizing this after reading. This is going to be a whole group activity. After you've read it, ask students to summarize. You can show students what that means. You can do it together. They can do it independently or with a partner. Finally, collect these for an assessment to determine whether or not students are able to understand literal understandings of a text.
Patti Firth:The next is going to be the must do word work activity. This is the piece that I recommend that every teacher collect and mark weekly of their students. This is going to be found on the bottom half of the back of your worksheet page that students are using. This is the activity that students must complete in their word work center time first before they're able to move on to the more engaging or fun spelling center activities, which you will find up at the top on the right hand side of the back of the page. There are two activities that students can choose from.
Patti Firth:There are 12 activities total for all of the center's activities. They are easy, low prep. I recommend teachers prep all 12 activities once and then use them over and over again Each week. You will select two of the 12 activities or use the one selected for you that you want your students to complete. These center's activities should be completed last, after students have already done the must do activities, and it is totally normal if you have some students may not complete these center's activities due to meeting with you in guided instruction more often or them simply just taking longer to do the must do spelling activity. This is okay. I don't recommend marking the center's activities. However, I would think that occasionally it's important to check for completion when you're doing the center's activities. I always use them in these three steps First, you want students to be completing the must do assessment question each week because you're going to collect it at the end of every week and mark it. Then you're going to choose two of the not of the 12 activities from the choice board to complete each week and finally, you're going to complete these activities by the end of every week. The center's activities and ignited spelling can replace the current spelling activities within ignited literacy as well. You can also continue to use the current center's activities within the ignited literacy program as they will continue to work with your exemplar word list from the ignited spelling written program. Now there are 12 activities that you can choose for your spelling centers.
Patti Firth:We have included and embedded cursive into the spelling centers so that students can write their exemplar words in cursive writing to embed that component of the curriculum into your program. We also have a version of Scrabble called LexiconDual, where students will spell their words out on a modified Scrabble board. They can play bingo with their words. They can create a spelling battleship. These are games they could play with partners and friends in their classroom while other students are working on other things. There's also mystery spelling. This is an independent activity but they can come up with a clue pattern and a code to spell their words. They can draw pictures. They can create a fortune teller or a cootie catcher for their spelling ruler pattern and quiz their friends. They can play graphene gamut, which has them coding different words in the parts of the words. They have a game board, graffiti art wall, a word search spelling or syllable safari finding a syllables.
Patti Firth:There are lots of different ways that students can practice and you select two of those every single week for students to complete with. I do recommend that the first time you introduce a center's activity, that you do that as a whole group lesson so they have an understanding of how to complete each one of the center's activities. Now, where do you find assessment? The first place I find assessment is I mark the must do spelling activity that's on the back of the practice page that each student receives each week. Second place I find assessment is I do mark the summary for knowledge and understanding of their reading, as well as the vocabulary some of the time. I'm not collecting them every week, but I will collect them occasionally to check in that students are doing those correctly. And third, is I really look for the application of these spelling skills into their actual writing? Students within ignited literacy are writing every single day. They're writing all the time. So as I'm collecting and reviewing students' writing, I really want them to be able to apply some of the spelling rules and patterns that we are reviewing in class to improve their overall spelling ability in their own personal writing. Now the center's activities can also be checked for completion, but they only really do these occasionally. I'm only marking the center's activities occasionally and more as a result of a classroom management concern, because maybe they're not using their independent time correctly and it is less about me marking their work to see if they get it. I've also included inside ignited spelling a summative assessment overview which will go through the content that is taught for the five week unit to review those concepts in a quick quiz. So it's another way that you can assess student learning at the end of a learning period.
Patti Firth:There's lots of questions about the report card. Now here in Ontario, we've reduced how the report card is being written as a result of the new curriculum. It appears as though we are being asked to put a single mark that best represents the overall success in their subject of language arts. This means that there's not going to be a lot of specifics that are reflecting exactly what we're doing all of the time. We're going to be collecting all of our marks across all of the different strands that reflect all of the different curriculum expectations. That's not changed. We're still going to be doing that.
Patti Firth:When it comes to finding a mark for the report card, really, what we are being asked to do is to put that all together and decide what is the most consistent mark of student ability. Where are they on the spectrum of understanding for language arts? How close are they to meeting provincial standard? Extending, approaching or struggling? That is really what the report card is being asked when it comes to marks. So don't stress or worry too much that you can't capture all of the learning that is happening in your classroom under one mark. No one can. You're doing your best assessment of where they are on that continuum using all of the pieces of information that you have.
Patti Firth:I do recommend that you add information specifically on the things that they're able to do through your comment section within the report card to understand and highlight their skills and their application of their spelling skills into their writing.
Patti Firth:And I also think it's important to just use your best judgment and communication skills to communicate accurately to parents how students are doing throughout the year with the various assessments that you provide, so the students don't rely solely on the report card as a factor to tell them how their child is doing.
Patti Firth:The report card, because it has become so much more general in its ability to communicate how students are doing to their parents, add additional items or forms as a way of communication to communicate about a child's level and ability across different concepts and strands, because the report card is no longer going to do that. So hope this gives you a good idea about how to integrate spelling skills into your junior grade level classroom in a simplified, streamlined way. That may feel brand spanking new, which it is, and that's okay. I hope your key takeaways here are understanding that we are explicitly teaching students to recognize the patterns and rules that exist within our language and teach them explicitly how to use and understand these rules, as well as how to apply them in lots of different contexts within the classroom. There's lots of different strategies that we can use here. These are some of the ways I feel is going to be the best and simplest way to integrate more spelling intentionally and systematically into your junior level classroom.
