Phonics Instruction to Improve Spelling

Week 1: "I definitely know this study is something my students need. Based on their  whole study pretest scores, MAP data scores, and  weekly preview test, spelling is not a strength of many of my students."

"My weekly schedule was difficult to stick to. Whole group was alright. I feel like I should have planned more exact activities for my instruction days. Small group phonics instruction took over half of our small group reading time each day. I don't know if that's because I paced it slowly or because we are all getting used to all the activities."

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Week 2: "After grading Week 1's post-tests, kids had an average improvement of 2.7 more words spelled correctly. This boosted my confidence going into this week!"

"I realized on day 2 of instruction that my phonics pattern (or, ore, oar) is not always a pattern of when to use the certain spellings for the sound. This complicated teaching because it was more of "these are ways to do it, but I can't exactly teach you when to use it."

Modeling the differentiation phonics activity this week took more time because last week the products were not exactly what I pictured or expected from students."

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Week 3: "Weekly improvement keeps growing. This week I started having the kids repeat the words on their Elkonin boxes. I can't say what this helped or how much it helped their spelling, but it was another look at the words and how each sound fits into a box. We also discussed how each box may have more than one letter in it because sometimes more than one letter is needed to make a sound."

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Week 4: "This was the first week I was able to quickly facilitate phonics instruction activities each day in small group instruction. We had enough time to read our books as well."

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Week 5: "This was the first week I asked the kids to highlight the part of the word with the directed phonics sound in our OOPS! word sort organizer. I think it will help the kids understand where within the word the phonics sound occurs, then analyze which spelling pattern was used to spell that sound in that specific place of the word. Like I said a few weeks ago, sometimes there isn't rhyme or reason to when to use the specific spelling patterns, but if I were to do this study again, I would have had students highlight all along."

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Week 6: "Last week of teaching and testing for this study. Whole group and small group instruction has solidified, consistent, and timely. A lot of testing will be done this week to round out the quantitative data. I'm not a huge fan of testing this much, but it is showing me the growth and reteaching that needs to happen."