Paola Dalmonech
ELE 203.1456 – Language and Literacy in Childhood Education
Dr. Sterling-Deer
Linking Knowledge to Practice Paper #5
October 19, 2009
Chapter 5 of our textbook is focusing on the alphabetic code mainly for lower
grades, such as Kindergarten and first grade. However, I strongly believe that learning to
spell out words is part of literacy activities that can also be used in upper grades.
To this end, I want to share one activity that my mentor teacher proposed to her
students who are in fifth grade. At the beginning of every week, she introduces a list of
new words that are totally unknown to the students. She gives them the meaning of each
word stating a couple of examples and then she writes them down on a large chart that
she hangs in the classroom. Before assigning an activity, the teacher asks her students to
pronounce the words aloud trying to make every sound as much clearly as possible. For
example, the word “obstreperous” resulted to be difficult for the pupils to say aloud.
Therefore, the teacher decided to have the students divide the words into syllables.
Moreover, she asked the students to identify the ending of the word mentioned above,
and everybody answered correctly by saying “ous”.
Afterwards, the teacher made the students think and connect their thought by
asking, “What is another words that ends in ous?”. Promptly, the students relied, “There
are many words that end with the same sound. For example, nauseous, obnoxious,
anxious, courteous, stupendous…” I was surprised to hear and see how much knowledge
was coming out from the students. Particularly, what caught my attention was their
ability of connecting thoughts in such a short period of time. They were asked to give
examples of words ending with the same sound, and the students responded immediately
approaching the question with no fear, yet with security and determination.
I am aware of the fact that these students are in an upper grade, and that they
aren’t fully suitable for what chapter five concerns. However, I believe that these children
are not too old to be left out because they are still in the process of learning, and they aim
to achieve literacy in the best and most effective way. Unfortunately, I never had the
possibility to observe a low grade to see how the stages of spelling are taught since I am
interning in a fifth grade, yet I could associate certain concepts of the chapter I read,
“Cracking the Alphabetic Code” with my fieldwork, and now comprehend how students
spell words by simply using the strategies they had learned previously. Undoubtedly,
these strategies become more and more effective in later spelling because students gain
more knowledge and awareness in correcting themselves. In fact, from my in-class
observation, I notice that students like to refer to the word walls that are hung up in the
classroom because, when the students are writing, they look at the words posted on the
word wall and on the other charts in the classroom and this helps them learn to spell the
words.
For example, when Mrs. P., who is the teacher I am observing at P.S.51, gave the
students a spelling quiz on Monday, she had them spell out a list of words she said aloud,
yet she didn’t allow them to use the word chart. They had to remember the spelling by
heart. I don’t know how the students scored because she hasn’t checked the tests yet.
Overall, I think spelling is a developmental process. As researchers have
examined, the number of misspellings increases in grades one through four as students
write longer compositions, but it decreases in the upper grades. In fact, when I did my
first internship last Spring, I happened to be in a second grade class, and I remember
students making a multitude of misspelling errors, and incredibly the teacher wasn’t
correcting them because, according to her, this type of disability gets fixed by itself later
on. This semester instead, I am observing a group of fifth graders moving through their
writing and not making as many misspelling miscues as they probably used to do in their
past. Hence, I realize that the activities they might have learned during the emergent
spelling became useful and worthwhile; as an illustration, those activities represent the
same ones explained in details in chapter five of our textbook.