Differentiated Spelling: Words Their Way

Have you ever thought that drill and kill was the complete wrong approach to teaching spelling?  Have you ever wondered why ineffective spelling instruction from 100 years ago is still present in the classroom today?

This post offers alternatives to traditional spelling instruction.

First, you need to check out Words Their Way  by Donald R. Bear.

Words Their Way focuses on teaching in the way that the brain naturally acquires knowledge.  Word sorting and pattern recognition is a huge part of this program.  

Now I want to stop and let you all know that my district uses Scott-Foresman's Reading Street, and the name of the game right now is FIDELITY (that's your favorite word, isn't it?).  So I'm not throwing out the bath with the bath.  I will still give my weekly required spelling tests.

However....

Today I gave my students the Elementary Spelling Inventory (part of Words Their Way).  It's a list of 25 words that you ask the students to spell.  They write any sounds they hear, even if they don't know how to spell the entire word.  The results are AMAZING!!!!!!

The scoring guide breaks the results down into the students' individual developmental spelling stages.  Now you can group students together by ability and give them remedial practice or an extra boost. I use this data at conferences and talk with the parents about how their child is developing in relation to their peers. I try to forgo all the teacher jargon and break it down into layman's terms.
"You're child is still working on spelling short vowel words like cat and dog."
 -Or-
 "You're child is very advanced at this stage.  We will continue to push them by working on blends such as -sh, -ch, -th..."

Ok, I know what you're thinking.  That all sounds great.  Now how are you going to differentiate all that?!

Here's the best part.  They already did the work for you!

In these books, it has weekly word sorts and activities for your kiddos.  Granted, this is a big initial investment.  If it were up to me I'd throw the reading street book out the window when it comes to spelling and just use this program!

I use The Daily 5, so my students will do word differentiated word sorts during rotations (word work).

What do you do for spelling/word work?