Third Grade Spelling

Phonics

Each week there is a phonics skill that is reviewed. At school, we will spend time reviewing that skill. The weekly spelling worksheet also provides practice with the phonics skill. There are short tests that allow me to check on how well a student understands the skill.

Word Preview

Each week there are 5 words that we preview in class. These are high frequency words. Some of them are easy and some of them are harder. The purpose of reviewing these words is to practice focusing on the spelling of words. This practice pays off when a student goes back to edit a piece of writing for spelling errors.

Words to Learn Lists and Super Speller Words

Part of the Sitton Spelling program is a cloze test. A cloze test is a paragraph that has blanks for missing words. The missing words are read aloud to the students and they try to spell them correctly on the blank. The words they are expected to spell are high frequency words found in writing.

After the students have taken two or three cloze tests, they will create a “Words to Learn” list. This list contains any word misspelled on a cloze test.  This list can also contain Super Speller words or Juicy Words. These words are posted on my word wall and are interesting words that were used in the literature that we are reading in class. Students choose the words that they want to practice from the word wall. It is possible for a student to have spelled everything correctly on the cloze tests and therefore have to create a “Words to Learn” list from the word wall. At this level, I am looking for 10 words to practice.

Assessment

1. Cloze tests – measures how well students are learning to spell high frequency words
2. Skills test – measures how well a student understands a phonics rule
3. Dictation tests – also measures how well students are learning to spell high frequency words
4. Spelling tests – at the end of some dictation tests I will ask the students to spell words from their “Words to Learn” list. I will read aloud some words from the word wall. I will also ask them to write any words that they practiced during the week. I want them to challenge themselves in a safe environment, so I will be marking the words that they spell correctly and simply correcting the incorrectly spelled words. All students are challenged to try to spell any of the words given. If they did not practice that word but are trying to spell it for fun, they will put a question mark next to it.
5. Writing Assignments – the ultimate measure of how well a student spells – I will be looking for the correct spelling of high frequency words and a phonetically accurate guess at juicy words.