Sunday, February 2, 2014

busy, busy, busy......

Yikes, this year has been soooooo much busier than I thought.  I had an intern from August-December and thought I'd have time to get so far ahead but there are so many new things this year with SLOs, (student learning objective), piloting new NGSS units for Science, Common Core everything, CogAt testing for GT, teaching a new spelling program, and having five teachers on my team who are either new to the school or new to third grade.  Ahhhhh!!!

Well, hopefully, I'm back to blogging and making teaching goodies.  Starting with some word cards for our spelling program!   My team is using WordWorks and Real Spelling to teach spelling.  It's an inquiry-based program that teaches that English spelling is based on meaning, not pronunciation. Students start with a base word and add affixes to create a sum.  Then based on the spelling laws and flowcharts for checking, rewrite the sum as a word.  For example, sign + ate + ure = signature.  So far we have learned the flowcharts or suffix checkers that give the "reasons/rules" for dropping a single, silent e, doubling final consonants, and when to keep a y at the end of a base word.

Once you  see it in action and get the hang of it, it's an AMAZING program!  We are the first in the state to be using it and our goal is for our school to use it next year and then maybe more in the county, until it starts catching on.  It makes so much more sense once you are able to stop thinking phonetically (that took me a while).    I'll be adding more goodies I'm creating for the program soon.  But to start here are two freebies:



This practices using a suffix checker to decide whether to drop the single, silent e at the end of the base word or suffix (when adding another suffix).


I will be adding more soon!  If you have any questions, please comment!

❤❤
~Colleen