Amy Peabody March 26, 2013 Professor Rich ELD 307 Spelling Inventory The student who participated

in this spelling inventory was an eight-year-old girl and in second grade. There are many patterns to the errors that were made during this assessment and this information provides information to where the students strengths are and where the student needs development. This assessment also tests a students ability to listen as well as write so that they can spell the words. I gave this student twenty-four words in this spelling inventory instead of twenty-five because it fit on one sheet of paper clearly and fit into the time allotted to do this assessment. Before giving this assessment I asked my cooperating teacher, Miss Refsin, who I should assess and she suggested this student because she is an average speller and she would probably make a few mistakes so that there was something for me to analyze. After scoring this spelling inventory I learned where the strengths and weaknesses are of this particular student. This student excelled in several categories: initial consonants, final consonants, short vowels, diagraphs and blends. This student struggled in some of the more difficult categories: long vowels, other vowels, inflected endings, syllable junctures, unaccented final syllables, harder suffixes and bases or roots. The errors that were made occurred at least twice in each category where errors were made. There were times when the student made mistakes but she erased them and self corrected. This spelling inventory would allow me to see where students excel and struggle. If I were to give this inventory to the whole class then I would be able to group the students into spelling groups and base them on where they need practice. If my students were based in groups that helped them practice their spelling then the goal would be that their weaknesses would disappear. I would use this in my

classroom because I think it is more efficient than just giving the entire class the same spelling words because the spelling groups will help the students progress more and offer challenges when applicable. I asked this student to help me do a homework assignment to inform her as to why I was pulling her out of the classroom and into the hallway. I informed her that I needed her to take a spelling test for me so that I could see how well she knew different types of words and she was excited to help me. She was very cooperating and gave me her full attention in the hallway as she performed this task. I was glad to see her take her time on this task and she was able to self correct herself on a few words, although she did spell the word place correctly and then erased it and rewrote it as pleace. This spelling inventory was meant to be an individual task and it worked out quite well with this student because she made some errors but also had areas where she excelled. The fact that there were several errors in the same categories made me realize what areas she needs improvement and this would be effective for the entire class if we know everyones strengths and weaknesses. This student needs improvement in bases and roots the most; she did not get a single word correct in that category. The last five words were all spelled incorrectly and this may be because they were more difficult words. One word that was spelled wrong was cellar, she spelled it seler she was trying to spell the word that had a different meaning than the word I asked her to spell but she was not aware of this. The areas that I would want to focus on first would be long vowels and inflected endings; these two areas need improvement because of how often words fall into these categories. A word sort may help her develop a sense of spelling patterns. We played a game in class once where there were two bags, one bag had the beginnings of potential words and the other had the endings. When you picked one word card out of each bag then there was potentially a word, the student would have to try and figure out if it was a real word and if it was spelled correctly. I feel as though these two types of word games would help this student with spelling. This particular student struggled with certain vowel

patterns and this may be because English is not the only language she speaks; sometimes there is a correlation between vowel patterns in spelling errors with multiple languages. I would make sure that when it comes time to pick out spelling words that the words focus on the areas where she struggles: long vowels, inflected endings, syllable junctures, unaccented final syllables, harder suffixes and bases or roots. This student was very pleasant during this spelling inventory and very helpful at the same time. I chose a student who was an average speller for this class on purpose because I knew I would have more areas to critique and analyze. My cooperating teacher wanted to see the results and she informed me that this student has improved in her spelling skills since she first started second grade. Overall, her score for words correct was 13/24. Her score for feature points was 45/60. The total score for this spelling inventory was 58/85.