I collected a handful of writing samples from my class and I chose to analyze two of them. I chose G, a Caucasian boy who seems to do well on most assignments and does not need assistance too often. I also chose D, an African American girl who transferred to the class last semester, who tends to struggle and need assistance on certain assignments.
G's writing would fall under the category of stage 3: Within-Word Pattern Spelling. I believe this because he does not abbreviate any words which is common in stage 2. he spelled some long vowel words correctly but did confuse some spelling. He is 7 years old so it would be appropriate for him to still be developing into this stage. Some examples of his incorrect but very close spelling words are: "yestorday," "toco," "wen," "watchd," "aet," and "crem. Some words that he spelled correctly are: "went," "home," "movie," "ice," "then," "bed," "bell," "got," and words like "I," "to," and "we."
D's writing would fall under the category of stage 2: Letter Name-Alphabetic Spelling. I believe this because she does more than scribble and make letters, but she has not quite reached stage 3 where students learn long vowel patterns and r-controlled words. D can represent phonemes in words with letters but her spelling is very abbreviated. Her writing sample is, "I am gng to tolg n t is gowg t b fun t n t is go nto b fun t bekz i b n t w z funt." I'm not positive where some of the spaces are supposed to go, so I may be a little off, however it is clear (until maybe the end for me) what she is attempting to write but she is leaving out important vowels. I think she is only at the beginning level of this stage because she has yet to achieve other aspects of it, but she has the understanding of consonant sounds. An example on page 168 of the beginning level of this stage would be to spell dog as D and cookie as KE and I think that her writing sample shows some of these abbreviations in it.
Do you guys notice a range of writing in your classroom? D is on the younger side (I think) of students in the class, and she transferred. Do you think any of this has an effect on her writing, and would you consider her to be struggling or at an appropriate level? I think that G is one of the 7 year olds in the classroom and I'm not sure if that has anything to do with his writing or not, either. Also, this is first grade, I forgot to mention that!
I hope you guys had a more fulfilling experience than I did from this week’s topic. As I have mentioned before, I am in a fifth grade classroom of mostly middle class, white kids. I’m interested in seeing some of the examples from younger grades that you guys will have. I took the time to talk to my CT more about that this week and she confirmed my observations. She only identified two of the students as having families that weren’t as supportive of school. Even then she thought they still had sufficient parental involvement to be successful.
ReplyDeleteTo respond to Taylor's question, I have not looked at age differences in my classroom. I would have to explore that more to find out who is what age. It's an interesting question. I almost think that by fifth grade some of that may have been grown out of, but I may be wrong. Hmm.
The two writing samples I collected were from girls in the white middle class category. Each of the samples consisted of almost two hundred words (197 and 194) as directed in the textbook’s assessment. The first time I went through I just picked out the words that were spelled incorrectly. In the first example this was just one word. Noisy was spelled noisey. In the second example only three words were spelled incorrectly. Becoming was spelled becomeing, different was diffrent, and orangish was orangeish. Although I’m not even sure orangish is a word. My spell checker is telling me it’s not. In all of these examples the e seems to be a trouble spot. It is missing or added in places it doesn’t belong, usually because of a derivational relationship. This seems to indicate that these students belong in the fifth stage.
The question I had about this assessment was on how you grade it with so few mistakes. If I had a sample where they spelled one word wrong, but it was at the third level, does that mean they’re at the third level? That seems to be what the text says. My common sense seems to indicate this is wrong though. What if the student spelled several harder words correctly during the sample? Wouldn’t this indicate a higher stage? What if the student only used very simple words to spell but attempted and made a stage five mistake? That doesn’t mean they’re at a stage five. As with everything a certain amount of common sense has to be used here. I’m just sometime dubious because it often doesn’t seem like assessments give any leeway for common sense.
One final note from my examples has to do with common sense. I noticed in both of the samples that there were words that they used unconventional ways of writing. How does this enter in to the assessment? Neither student spelled out fifth and instead opted to use 5th. Numbers were represented as 13 instead of thirteen. Another question was how to assess words that were correct, but were compound and not put together correctly. Two examples were alot instead of a lot and out-going instead of outgoing. If I had to work on a center with them it might cover these topics. We could work a little on compound words and writing conventions. We might also work on words that have an e ending, but change when a suffix morpheme is added.
Joel, my classroom is very similar to yours. I am in a fifth grade classroom and they are all middle class, predominantly white. The students are very engaged and well-behaved, and I know they all come from very supportive families. The three writing samples I collected came from boys, and I was actually quite impressed with their writing.
ReplyDeleteBy fifth grade, I don't think that the age differences matter as much with the students' learning as it does in the younger grades. By now, they are all pretty much on the same level academically. The girls are still a little better in the classroom with regards to behavior and finishing their homework first, but I would not say that their is a more intelligent gender overall.
From my writing samples (about three notebook pages worth of story), I found that my students were pretty good with writing, punctuation, spelling, and following the correct structure for writing stories, but their writing lacks deep thought and effort in making ideas flow. I guess I expected them to be able to write out more complete thoughts and expand on topics more than they did. I was also surprised at how punctuation was somewhat of a challenge for them; I thought that was more of a lower elementary struggle. Their spelling was ok, just minor mistakes. One student kept spelling finally as "finially" and had trouble keeping his verb tenses consistent. Another student wrote very sloppy, so it was a little bit harder to see if there were spelling errors.
Comparing this assignment to previous placements, looking at writing samples is definitely more interesting when they are done by lower elementary kids. In fifth grade, they have the rules down and can write pretty efficiently.