I found this chapter interesting and challenging, in some ways. In my experience, most of my students are past this stage in 5th grade but for those of them who are not, they are content with asking a neighbor how to spell a word or just misspelling it rather than trying to actually grasp the pattern or rules for why it is spelled a certain way.

My frustration comes with my students not particularly caring about being a competent speller. They spell like they talk and like they see their parents text and seem to think that I am a five-headed monster for expecting them to actually take pride in their written work and spell words correctly.

I think I will have to find more time (yeah right!) to focus on the word sorts to teach these critical skills. I just wish someone could simplify my classroom and group them accordingly to just allow me to get a grasp on what I should be doing and when I should be doing it. It is quite overwhelming for a 1st year teacher with 7 SPED students, 2 EIP students and 2 behavior disorders in a regular end classroom teaching all of the content areas. I just can't seem to keep ahead.

LM 4

I enjoyed the spelling activity because I was able to use it with my own personal child. I decided to conduct the word game using magnetic tiles that spelled out his name. I, at first, called the letters out that belonged in his name and asked Carter to locate the letter tiles and “build” his name. He did so with no problem. Next, I instructed him to not use any uppercase letters and to rebuild his name as I called the letters out orally. This caused some confusion for him. I was surprised by the delay when I asked him to focus just on lowercase letters; it almost seemed as though they could be used interchangeably with uppercase and, therefore, would be no reason to know the difference.

            I explained to my son that uppercase and lowercase did mean the same things but that it was important to be able to recognize which letters were in front of him regardless of the case. Next, I spelled out his name, this time using his middle and last names to avoid the familiarity aspect. I spelled all of these out using the capitol letters and had him go behind me and try to build his name using lowercase tiles. This took him 4 and a half minutes and he was able to do it correctly when selecting tiles from piles of upper and lowercase letters.

Overall, I was intrigued by the fact that, even though Carter has known his uppercase alphabet for quite some time, he struggled to relate the uppercase letter with the lowercase letter and that confusion led to his inability to make the letter sounds necessary to “reading” even the words he was familiar with. I think it is very important not to rely so much on the way letters look after the child initially learns them by sight and I can now see the value in showing children different fonts of letters so that he or she can truly gain understanding in their foundation to reading.