Friday, December 30, 2011

Spelling Tests for real learning

What is the purpose of giving spelling tests?

We want to prepare our students for their future lives
and to become good writers.  If someone is a poor speller,
it then reflects back on all other parts of their performance.

The problem with spelling tests is that students only study for
the test.  Then after the test, everything is forgotten.

One way to combat this attitude, is to have each student to have
a personal spelling chart.

When the student gets back the general spelling test,
they should have a different list ready to put all the
words that were missed on the last test.

Then each student will have to learn the review words
for the next week.

This doesn't have to be a lot of extra work for the teacher
however.  When it comes to the spelling test for the nest week,
the teacher can just collect the personal spelling test sheets
from each student, and pick only 5 words from each list
for the test.

It is also helpful to have the student to practice writing
sentences with the missed words.

Spelling  is an important skill for preparing students
for further academic achievement.

This method can be used for students in all grades.


1 comment:

Leo said...

Hi Rachael
Good to know there are other bloggers from the same neck of woods as myself:)

I don't know if you were at the Winter ETAI Conference but BC guest speaker Pauline Newman gave a workshop called Spelling Made Easy which was very successful. Look out for her at future ETAIs - she might come back to Israel.

All the best for 2012!

Baby Shark Game like Hangman. . .

This is an example of how I played the game today with a student:  You can print this or play it using Zoom! I think of a word from the less...