While I was in my second grade class I collected two
writing samples from two writers. I chose one writer because I saw many words
that were spelled phonetically but she seemed very familiar with CVC words. The second
writer I chose because I was impressed by them using blends and digraphs correctly whereas I saw many other students struggling with them. Due to these two very different
writing samples I would have to say that my class is split between Letter
Name-alphabetic Spelling (Stage 2) and Within-word Pattern Spelling (Stage 3).
This makes sense because my students are about 7 years old and according to
Thompkins, Stage 2 occurs around ages 5-7 and Stage 3 occurs around ages 7-9.
In my struggling writer I notice that words such as “because”
are spelled “bcus”. This shows that they are listening to the sound of the word
but are unfamiliar with how to spell it. However, CVC words are all spelled
correctly such as “can”. I do not see a high use of consonant blends
In the high achieving writer I see words such as “party”
spelled correctly which shows their knowledge on r-controlled words. This
student is taking more risks and using larger words such as “listening”.
However, there are still a few mistakes such as they meant to write “from” and
wrote “form”.
A literacy center that both writers would benefit
from would focus on r-controlled vowels. The stage 2 writer could get
introduced to the idea of r-controlled vowels and the stage 3 writer needs to
become more accurate with her spelling of r-controlled vowels. I found a really
cool activity on Pinterest that will help kids visualize the words and make a
game out of figuring out which vowel goes in each word.
The students get paper train cars that have
r-controlled words in them with the vowel missing. Once they fill in the vowel
they connect the train cars together that have the same vowel. This seems like
a great activity for introducing the concept as well as practicing it. These
could even be taped to their desk as a resource.
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