I was visiting a school recently and as I was leaving I spoke with the office manager/teacher aide who was individually testing a child on his Spell Write spelling list.
She would say the word, say it again in context and say the word again
This was great as it showed me that the teacher was trying to differentiate the learning for individual students to find out what they knew individually rather than testing groups of learners when many of them were maybe not ready for it or had already moved on.
What has always concerned me though was the time it takes to individually test children in this sort of way.
When teaching, to overcome this issue I made a recordings of myself administering the test using Garageband or Audacity on a PC. I then put those tracks into an iTunes playlist and put it on my iPod Nano or iPad.
I also made a template like this for children to record their words so they would know where they were up to.
This worked really well as the children could play the track at a pace that suited them and rewind words if they wanted to for clarification or if I was going too fast.
With permission from NZCER, the publishers of Spell Write, I share with you the audio of me reading Essential List One to give you the idea. It would take no more time for you to record yourself doing this once for your whole class as it would to do it once for one child. And then you never have to do it again. I have the other audio tracks and list templates I am happy to share with you if you let me know.
I also linked to Spelling City website or iPad app on my the sidebar of our class blog so children could play games and test themselves on lists based on the Spell Write lists.
Here is the Spell Write List One words but I link to the rest as well so all children have access. You are welcome and encouraged to link to my other lists as well if you wish.
http://www.spellingcity.com/view-spelling-list.html?listId=1914661
I found that doing these things meant that children could move at a pace and level that suited them- with some children making much accelerated progress.
Here are the links to the individual lists in Spelling City…
What do you do to differentiate the learning of the essential spelling words?
