First Interview

      After much anxiety, I finally conducted my first set of interviews today. Originally, I had intended to interview three students but only had time to interview two students before chaos struck. One student had a physical melt down while another student had not taken his strongly needed medication. Despite these obstacles, I was very excited overall as to how the interviews went. Unfortunately, I have not had time to transcribe them, but wanted to share my day's reflection about them. For each interview I had the students write down a sentence that I dictated. These sentences were created using at least one word that followed the spelling patterns being studied this week. My first student (#18) wrote the sentence "It is starting to snow." Initially, I had a different sentence created, however, she was so excited about the snow coming down that it was all she could talk about when we were together! Her group is studying the spelling pattern "-ing" in which root words drop the "e" or nothing happens. As she started to write "starting," she stopped at the word "start." I waited to see what she was going to write next. At first, I thought she might have misunderstood the sentence. Then, she slowly started to write "-ing" correctly. I was beaming inside! After finishing writing the sentence, I asked her how she knew to spell "starting." She started telling me about how she learned it during the initial "pre-assessment," the test I used to divide my students into appropriate groups. After further questioning, she was able to tell me it was because of the pattern her group studied last week. She continued to tell me that she learned last week that when words end in two consonants, a person just adds "-ing." Her line of thinking was absolutely correct! Even though "starting" fell into the category of do "nothing" when adding -ing, she connected the word to a previous spelling pattern studied.
      When interviewing my second student (#12), I was semi-successful. I asked her to write the sentence, "The moth had a long yawn." Her group is studying the "au" sound found in cause, lawn, and cross. When she initially wrote the sentence, she misspelled the word "yawn" as "youn." I then asked her questions about the spelling pattern she was studying this week. She gave a clear explanation of the pattern. Then, I asked her if there were any words in the sentence that made the "au" sound. She identified "moth" and "yawn." Then, I asked her if these words followed her spelling pattern. With a few more questions, she was able to change the word "yawn" to the correct spelling by using her current spelling pattern.
      Overall, I would call today a success. Schlagal (2002) states “[s]orting and manipulating these lists of words by their patterns provides a powerful dimension of interest and focus to a week’s instructional sequence and can help children to see and understand the orthographic structures they are studying” (p. 54). Both students were able to make connections to their spelling pattern when writing their sentences. These students were able to refer back to the vowel patterns and suffix patterns being studied for the the current week. Instead of being given 20 words that follow a variety of spelling patterns, these students were able to find success by being given 24 words that follow one or two patterns. 

For more information on spelling, you can read the following article that I quoted from in this post.

Schlagal, B. (2002). Classroom spelling instruction: History, research, and practice. Reading Research and Instruction, 42(1).