The Spelling Bee

We are currently trying to figure out how to do spelling instruction amongst our fifth grade class. Over the break I took home all of their writing journals and read their entries. I was looking for a few things:

1.I wanted to see how the students were trying to introduce their topic to the reader.
2.I was looking for common spelling errors to see if we really needed to use a different spelling list.
3.If the use of a more broad topic list on the last writing prompt actually gave me a larger writing sample and less blank stares amongst the students.

What I ended up focusing on was the number of spelling errors by ALL of the students amongst what are called “no excuse” words. There were so many that I was stunned. When we returned my master teacher and I discussed this at length. However, now that I have read this article I think we need to re-address this issue.

The first thing I was thinking was that there were many examples of invented spelling amongst the fifth graders for the word “because.” I found that odd and when I was able to locate several lists of 5th grade “no excuse” words because was on every list.
Here are the lists I found on the web using Google search engine:
http://estabrook.ci.lexington.ma.us/curriculum/sitton/SittonGrade5words.html
http://www.sbsd.k12.ca.us/District/Curriculum/NoExcuse.htm
http://dartingteacher.com/extras/words_noexcuse.asp

Oddly enough, this word was on the lists for the lower grades. There were so many things in this article that we spoke about, including having the students take a pre-test of these words before we give them the next homework pack with more spelling words on it. This will give us an opportunity to see if there is a pattern amongst the students that they simply need readdressed. Most of the students in my class have been at Phantom Lake since the inception of their education.

We spoke briefly about this before I left on Tuesday, but I believe this is the place to start. I like the idea of finding a pattern to group the words by. After the no excuse words are addressed, the homework packets are grouped this way for spelling. However, I am not sure writing 25 spelling words three times in cursive is helpful for the students. I am trying to think of other ways to teach them spelling that will be helpful to them. There were many great ideas within the article and I am excited to try them.

Ok, I have a tendency to write too much, so I will stop here. If you have any other ideas of how I can approach this please let me know!