This week's reading on making words dealt with an active, hands-on, manipulative activity in which kids discover sound-letter relationships and learn how to look for patterns in words. This is a great activity that allows children to see how words change when you add different letters and helps them understand the importance of where in the word letters occur. The Making Words activity should be used hand-in-hand with invented spelling. Studies have shown that children who participate in invented spelling are superior to others on word decoding. To me, this was extremely interesting because throughout my schooling emphasis was always placed on spelling the word correctly and never on spelling it the way I thought it sounded. This makes me wonder how many students in my class struggled with reading and writing because of this. The neat thing about the making words activity is that it provides you with a variety of ways to discover how the alphabetic system works. Think of how interested your students will be while doing this activity and think of how great it is that while they are entertained they are also learning fundamental strategies that will help them become strong readers and writers. This article is just another example of how intertwined reading and writing are.
When you were in school, did your teachers focus on spelling words correctly or did you use invented spelling?
The video below shows a great example of using the Making Words activity. Here the teacher does a great job with showing her students that just by adding letters or changing around the order of the letters you can make different words. She also helps them listen for all the letter sounds in the word and where the vowel sound appears in the word.
In my elementary classes when learning to read, write, and spell I had teachers who were mostly focused on drilling correct spelling into our minds, as a result I was missing out on some of the fundamentals. For example: sounding out vowel sounds was not a strong skill of mine, and therefore my spelling and "sounding it out" skills were behind. Luckily I had a great mom who recognized this and worked with me, but this is an example of how a teacher can think that they are doing a good job and really be limiting their students.
In my elementary classes when learning to read, write, and spell I had teachers who were mostly focused on drilling correct spelling into our minds, as a result I was missing out on some of the fundamentals. For example: sounding out vowel sounds was not a strong skill of mine, and therefore my spelling and "sounding it out" skills were behind. Luckily I had a great mom who recognized this and worked with me, but this is an example of how a teacher can think that they are doing a good job and really be limiting their students.
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