It took me until my 7th year of teaching to be ready to tackle differentiated weekly spelling words. Now that I've had 2 years of success with it, I'm never going back! I've gotten the most positive feedback from parents about the spelling words I give their children. They appreciate that I find out where their child is and challenge them. Too often we choose spelling words based on where the curriculum or standards say our students should be. This leaves about a third of the class bored and wasting their time, and a third of the class lost, confused, and frustrated. I've figured out a system that works for me to reach the needs of all of my students. Hopefully my system will give you some ideas or get you thinking about how you might be able to work this into your spelling program.
My team does weekly spelling lists. Typically we shoot for 10 words a week, however, the number of words depends on the students' needs. For many struggling spellers, we will choose only 5 or 6 words that all have the same spelling pattern, vowel sound, word family, or phonogram.
So how do you know what words to give each student?
I give a pre-test on Fridays after I give the post-test for the words we studied that week.
Here's the Pre-test and Post-test paper I copy front to back and cut in half for weekly tests. Feel free to download it from my
EdWorld Exchange store and use it in your class!
How many groups do I make?
I typically have 3 groups. I call them List A, List B, & List C. Sometimes I have students do so well on their challenge words that I have to make them their very own list. If I have one student on a list all by themselves, I will typically just name the list with the student's name. I had a student two years ago that was so advanced in spelling, that I used 7th and 8th grade science terms! It was awesome, because he was challenged, which he and his parents loved, but he was also learning advanced vocabulary terms.
Where do I get the words for the different spelling lists?
List A - word families, short vowels, words that incorporate the phonograms we are studying in class, in some cases I use sight words, RTI goals, istation data, etc.
List B - on grade level words either from Spalding Spelling, our district curriculum, or MY FAVORITE SOURCE:
Sailing Through First Grade (This teacher has got it going on! She has regular and challenge word lists that include related words and sentence dictation suggestions for the entire year. It's the best spelling list resource I've found; especially for FREE!!!!)
List C - vocabulary words from content areas, ie. geometry: sphere, cylinder, rectangular prism, animal classification groups: mammals, reptiles, etc.
How do you keep the different lists straight?
I use a table in a Word document. I update the words, and move the students' names around from week to week as needed. I post this table in the classroom so students know which words to practice during Daily 5. You're welcome to download this template and use it to organize your spelling lists.
