Allison's Post 2/11

**After I sent the e-mail to you about the writing sample, my MT said I could pick the samples up today. She had me come in right before class, or else I would have had this done sooner.

I collected two writing samples from student's writing journals. The journal entries were written on "Memory Monday" when students write about any memory that they have. I took writing pieces from students who have very different writing styles  writing knowledge. The one piece is written in great detail and is quite long. The student was very thorough about writing down her entire memory of watching the Super Bowl and celebrating her grandma's birthday. The other student does not care for writing and usually has to be urged to write more. He wrote about going to the mall and his sister's friend coming over.

Both of the writers are at stage two, letter name-alphabetic spelling. The students are beyond emergent spelling because they know how to make letters, can write left to write and can match letter sounds to the letter. Consonant blends and vowel sounds are being taught and reviewed in their class right now. Vowel sounds and identifying the vowel in a word needs to be worked on more. For example, in the boy's piece he wrote went as "wint," mall was "mol," walked was "wockt," my was "mi" and fun was "fon." They learned about long vowels, but the student still struggled, such as when he wrote came as "kam." Basic sight words were struggled with as well. Over is a current sight word, but he spelled it as "ovr." Overall the student did a decent job of sounding out words and being close.

The female writer does well with sounding out words and her spelling overall. the words she misspelled are: late was "lat," watched was "wcht," close was "clos," Valentine is "valitime," because was "becuse," power was "powr," phone was "phon," team was "tam," and tomorrow was "tomrw." She struggled with getting vowels correct as well. She did well with getting word parts such as: -er, -le, ght, and -st.

For a center I would have the students work on a vowel assignment.I want to have pictures on a sheet and have them identify which vowel goes with that word. I think it would also be beneficial for them to hear words and have to identify which vowel(s) are in the word for further practice (like a tape in the classroom tape player).