The Spell of Spelling

   Oglan's article “Writing and Spelling” opened up my eyes to a variety of factors about spelling. For example, some of the rules of spelling are very irrational and were created on arbitrary decisions by people such as William Caxton and Noah Webster. With these irrational rules spelling is a process that needs to be practiced.  Although spelling is a big factor of writing they are actually two different cognitive processes.

     I never knew that there were 3 types of spellers. The reluctant speller is someone I can relate to. I am a weak speller and sometimes use the safe word that I know how to spell.  As a teacher it will be important to encourage these spellers to go past their comfort zone. To do this the article suggests that I have them work with writing partner, a parental volunteer, and have word walls, dictionaries and charts. I also need to make it clear that spelling doesn’t make a good writer but the content of the work.

    The developing speller uses two strategies to spell. Spelling the word as it sounds and visually looking at how the word is spelt. It Is important that this type of student practices spelling correct words in order to internalize it. This student will eventually turn into independent spellers and may be called on others for assistance.

     Students with issues such as, ESL need extra help when it comes to spelling. It is important for them to read and have conversation about stories and combine drawing with spelling in order to establish English words.

       In Lawrence R Sipe's article, "Invention, convention, and intervention: Invented spelling and the teacher's role," the idea of expectations in brought into play. While a student named Kelly will spell words correctly with her reading teacher she does not spell them the same with her regular teacher. This is due to the fact that the expectations for her regular teacher are not as high and therefore she does not try as hard.  

      It is important for teachers to support child’s willingness and desire to write and not inhibit. One way for teachers to do this is by scaffolding. She can help the student discover how the word is spelt by making it clearer without giving the total word away. I think it is important that the teacher doesn’t give the whole answer away and rather when a student asks a question the teacher respond back with a question that fosters their thinking to find the answer.

     Some of the activities I found to be interesting include the have a go chart. This is where students recognize a word that is spelt wrong within their text.  They then attempt to spell the word correctly with assistance from a teacher or peer. If the spelling is wrong the teacher has them look the word up in the dictionary or spells it for them. Finally they copy the word to see how it is spelt. I think this is a good process to use because the student not only tries to spell the word themselves but will end up with the correct spelling and practicing that spelling. Practicing the correct spelling is a strategy that is pointed out in the last article to be helpful.

Coffee Lovers Unite!

A group of five from class met at the Boarder's book store coffee shop. Most of the things my group noticed about this place were interesting because they were repeatedly seen. For example, it was easy to point out that many people were reading something.  This idea of looking at what stands out relates to the reading in, “Crafting Writers”. Chapter 3 talks about naming specific craft and in particular the parts of speech. In order to recognize the parts of speech we have to realize what made it stand out. This compared to what we are doing at the coffee shop because we were recognizing things that stand out to us then, evaluating why. Why do the items that people are reading in the coffee shop stand out? This is because all of the reading material is similar. Information based (newspaper, news week magazines).

Some of the things that occurred in the coffee shop may seem odd to someone who has never been in this type of atmosphere. For example the name of the drinks (latte, kulas, java). When you hear a person saying these things it is because they are used to this type of place, they know the language and can use it to order something to eat or drink.  I can tell they have ordered before because they seem confident when they order with no anticipation.

Chapter 6 in the book tells why drawing is an important ability of young writers in order to provide information. This applies to our coffee shop dig as we drew the map of the coffee shop. With this map we were able to show a lot of details about the shop without writing a word.  Drawing this map helped me recognize why the shop was arranged this way. For example, the sitting area was located away from the actual ordering spot. This is most likely to make sure the sitting area remain quiet and it not interrupted with the sounds of drinks being prepared.  The colors and arrangement of the room is relaxing and because most people were reading (also a relaxing activity) it draws people to come here. From my experience with coffee shops I know that is it a quiet place to relax or work on something, which is what most people were doing and what it seemed to be set up for.

Writing Made Fun

In Shelbie Witte’s article, “that’s online writing not boring school writing”: Writing with blogs and the talkback project, she talked about how online writing is something that can help increase students desire to write. While in a parent teacher conference with a student who had no aspiration to write in the classroom, she found that the student was actively involved in writing online each evening. The student responded by saying that online writing was fun and classroom writing was boring.


The teacher started a project called the talkback project where she found that students were much more engaged. I think that the project this teacher created was a good idea and presented many benefits for the classroom. For example one teacher who implemented blogs into the classroom found that students were, “hungry for writing on their classroom blog”. Something that is rarely found in typical pencil paper responses. Also students today come from a digital way of life and will need little to no instruction or education on how to use digital tools such as blogs. Also, this gives students the opportunity to look for information and ideas from people outside the classroom since the internet extend to people all over the world.

As with all new assignments the teacher also ran into some problems during the talkback project. Since students use the internet for their own social purposes the blog somewhat turned into a place where students were posting things that were not related to class discussion. For this reason I think that when using this tool teachers need to make the instructions extra clear with rules about sticking to the assigned topics. The resources available in the classroom can also be a problem teachers can run into. Since not every school is blessed with a classroom set of computers, making arrangements so that each student has time to blog can become a problem. Also, if blogging is done from the home the issue of students having computers at home can become a problem.

After a while the teacher decided to refrain from the talkback project and go back to the old way of journaling in the classroom. She found that students were upset with this decision referring to the decision as “using leeches instead of nuclear medicine. Another student stated that “By taking away our access to the talkback project blog you have taken away my voice”. Since it was such a disappointment for the talkback project to be taken away from students, this is evidence that students are more engaged when using the blog. With my experience as a student I find that when I have an assignment I am excited to work on I put in more of an effort and more of an effort leads to more engagement in the materal. Overall these types of experiments can lead the classroom to a place where more learning occurs.