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Spelling Routine and Spelling Preview

SPELLING ROUTINE AND SPELLING CITY


Here are some details to help explain our spelling program and how it works.

● We work on a spelling pattern(s) for one week, starting on Wednesday and ending on Tuesday.

● Each Tuesday I give a preview of the next week’s words. The preview is usually the words from
the regular spelling list. How they do on the preview helps determine which list they work on for
the week (there are multiple spelling lists for differentiation). If your child knows all the words or
only got one wrong, he will do List B for the week. If he got more than half of the preview words
wrong, he will practice List A. Otherwise, your child will do List O, the regular spelling list.

● Challenge words are optional right now – later in the year I will require everyone to try one or
more. Getting them wrong is no problem! I don’t want kids to worry if they try them and don’t
know them they will be marked down.

● On the spelling quiz itself, there will be 2-5  bonus words – words that have the same
exact spelling patterns we worked on but are not on any of the lists students studied. After all, the
point is not for them to only get 100% on a quiz, but also to carry over the skill to spell other words
correctly. Using different words as well as monitoring their spelling in their writing will help you
and I know how they are doing. Doing spelling the traditional way (ie giving students a list of 10 words, having them memorize the words for  the weekly quiz) gives us a group of "Friday Spellers" who may or may not be able to translate the spelling skills into their daily writing). Here are two teachers use the same idea of quizzing students with different words then the words on the study list and have great blog posts:

My teacher buddy Sally's post called A True Test Of Spellign Skills 

And Beth Newingham's Post about word study at Scholastic 

● We practice at school and sometimes have spelling homework.

● Helping your children do a little extra practice is invaluable.

● We will be taking the quizzes on Spellingcity.com each week. That way a record of your child’s
performance is saved right there for later reference. You can even look it up when they are logged
on under records. The system only allows us to do the “Spelling Test” (red button) one time.
Therefore please do not have your child go online and do the spelling test at home. They may do
the “practice” test (gray button) at home. We will be using SpellingCity.com and the Spelling City app in our classroom. It can really help students learn their weekly spelling words while having fun at the same time! Feel free to have your child play any of the games on the site!

I will send home a paper with your child's Spellingcity username and password.

Once logged in, students will be automatically redirected to our classroom’s homepage, where their
spelling and lists will be clearly visible.

Please let me know if you have any questions at any point.



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