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Well, this page is blank so I thought it would be a good place to talk about the articles that were placed in the Task Force binders. 11/2/09 (M.S.) //Best Practices in Spelling Instruction: A Research Summary//

This article supported the use of explicit instruction for spellling. It stated that studeents should be guided through specific steps in spelling instruction, lists Monday and tese Friday does not increase spelling knowledge. Three specific programs Spelling through Morphographs, Spelling Mastery and Add-A Word were discussed because they all provide this instruction.

Also mentioned was Bruck and Waters research tha said "the most significant difference between students in the good, mixed adn poor groups was that good students showed better skills related to the use of morphographs."

- I am going to add my comments from this same article here.

As mentioned above, this article discussed three major spelling approaches, phonemic, whole-word and morphemic. The NPR found that systematic phonics instruction boosted the spelling skills of at-risk and typically developing readers across all socio-economic levels. This approach spends a lot of time making sure students have a strong base in letter sound correspondence. This does not come as a surprise to me with all that I have learned about the importance of phonemic awareness and phonics. It would seem to me that this is the system that most primary teaches use. If they follow the Harcourt lists then they are working on a specific phonics skill and tying it to their spelling.

For those irregular words we need a different approach for spelling instruction and that is where the whole-word approach comes in. According to the article, whole word approach has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it is effective for irregular words that do no follow a pattern. The disadvantage is that some whole word programs use this strategy for all words, even those that can be spelled by using phonemic rules. Within the whole word approach there are also two ways of teaching, implicit (give students lots of exposure but no real instruction) and explicit (teach students strategies to practice the words). The author highlights two explicit, whole word approaches that have had very good results, Add-A Word and Write-Say Method. A couple of the ideas that were shared were familiar to us, such as Study, Copy, Cover and Write- Say.

The author described the morphemic approach and explained several good points about this method. Teaching students to spell morphographs and teaching the rules for combining morphographs allow students to spell many more words than by individual weekly spelling test. They are actually learning how to use the different word parts to make and spell new words.

The author also shared that no matter what approach is used the teacher needs to include several other research-validated pieces when planning effective spelling instruction. These are sequenced lessons, cumulative review and systematic error correction.

My favorite part of this entire article was the author comparing the practice of having students memorize lists of words for weekly tests to having them memorize the answers to multi-digit subtraction problems instead of teaching them the rule for borrowing. :)

CJ

//Sitton Spelling and Word Skills//

I am not familiar with Sitton, but was surprised to learn that there is a program for primary grades and it is based on the wok of Donald Bear and others. I had thought it was for older grades. This also appears to be a program so all components would be needed for it to be used successfully, it is not just a strategy to utilize.