Hi I’m Kim Wakefield with Side by Side Educational Consulting, where we work side by side with educators to improve outcomes for all kids.
We all know this hot topic, should I or shouldn’t I give weekly spelling tests, I get asked this question over and over and over again. I took them as a student, I gave them as a teacher, and I’m here to tell you today that you need to stop wasting your time with weekly spelling tests. In many programs, they ask you to give a pretest on Monday and then a post-test on Friday. So let’s think about the instructional time that is spent testing our kids. Let’s use our time more strategically with intentional instructional opportunities to ensure that our kids can transfer the skill into writing practice. Isn’t that the goal when they’re writing we want them to be able to spell words seamlessly.
Let’s talk about several strategies that we can use to improve your instructional toolkit to make sure that our students are using multi-sensory approaches in regards to spelling. When we connect to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic opportunities for our kids with word work, you’re going to see that transfer over into their writing.
So stay tuned, we have a video series coming on several practices to help build word work in your classroom. We’re going to learn about phoneme-grapheme mapping. We’re going to learn about word sorting, we’re going to learn about dictation. We’re also going to focus on word building through word strings, and then we’re going to connect all those ideas together to help with sentence work with your students.
I can assure you when I work with teachers in classrooms and we implement these strategies, students confidence with spelling increases, and we see it transfer over into their writing, be sure to give us a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel so you can get updated when the next video is released.
