Last year our Reading Council ordered
Words Their Way as a book study for the Council members. We read and discussed the book and then decided to commit to trying the program in our classrooms as a pilot to see if it is anything that we would like to use school wide. After giving the pre-assessment I found that I have three different groups in my classroom. Each group is working on a different sort. One group on initial consonants - one group on short and long vowels and a final, larger group on blends. Will this improve decoding and spelling? It will be interesting to see. So far, so good.
5 comments:
Are you using the sorts for spelling words? Or just as extra practice?
@Abby - We are not using sorts for extra practice of spelling words. We gave the pretest from Words Their Way and found that our students are in 3 different groups for phonics/spelling. One of our first grade groups is working with initial consonants (about 8 students), the majority are working with digraphs, and a higher group of 3 students are working on long and short vowels. Each group meets 2-3 times a week to work on their sort which takes about 10 minutes. Let me know if you have more questions.
I'm wondering how it's going in the intermediate school. Any word?
@Abby. Grades is an interesting thing! In the Sort books, there is an assessment after each sort. So there is one after students have done consonants, one after blends, one after long vowels. Since the number of sorts is different for each phonics skill that means the students take the sort asessment at different times, depending on when they finish all the sorts for tht phonics skill so... I have a grade for Sort 1 in my grade book and that is whenever the students get to the end of their first sort - it will be a different time for each of my three groups. The sort is only one grade (or maybe two in a nine weeks) along with weekly Skills Tests. The Skills Test include 6 sight words each week that are the same for everyone because they are not based on any sort of pattern. The skills assessments also include a dictated sentence that includes captials and punctuation, a vocabulary word, antonyms (this nine weeks),and handwriting (this nine weeks only). Hope that helps.
That does - thank you!
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