Student Assessment

Originally, I had planned to give my students their spelling assessments last Friday. However, weather forced us to have a snow day. Thus, I had to assess my students yesterday. I gave the assessment in the morning hoping to have it graded by the end of the day. Unfortunately, I was not able to grade all of the assessments before the students left yesterday. Thus, I had to change plans. My students received their spelling words today and I met with each group to go over the spelling patterns being studied for this week. Despite starting a day later than planned, our class is back on the timeline schedule.

After much research, I decided to use the program Words Their Way to provide my students with differentiated spelling. In order to differentiate spelling for my students, I need to pre-assess my students. Using the spelling inventory from Words Their Way (Pearson, 2004), I called out 25 words for my students to spell.

A student sample of the pre-assessment given Monday.

Once I collected the pre-assessments, I used the spelling inventory to determine what spelling patterns each student needs to study. Based on the spelling pattern areas in need, the inventory places students into stages: Emergent, Letter-Name Alphabetic, Within Word Pattern, and Syllables & Affixes. 

Using the above spelling assessment, the spelling inventory placed this student in Middle Syllables & Affixes.

The maximum number of feature points a student could score was 78 points. In my classroom, I had students score between 27 and 78. Thus, the pre-assessment data confirming the need for differentiated spelling in my room. Using the feature points, I had four students fall into late Within Word Pattern, six students fall into early Syllables & Affixes, seven students fall into middle Syllables & Affixes, and two students fall into late Syllables & Affixes. Based on this information, I was able to form three spelling groups. The first weekly spelling test will be Friday. I will post in a couple days to let you know how the students performed in their various spelling groups.