What I Learned At My Developmental Level

My teaching this semester occurred in a third grade classroom where I learned so many different things about this developmental level. The first and most obvious thing I learned this semester was that every single student works at their own pace and this can vary substantially from one student to the next. My co-teachers and I taught a unit on writing a book with our students and when students were working on writing their actual book the progress levels of students were incredibly broad. On one end, you had students that only had an idea for their story, nothing on paper, then on the other end, you had students that were practically done and asking what they should do next. This aspect of the students and developmental level made me very thankful
I struggle with sounding out words in a way that is beneficial to students attempt at spelling that word. Part of this comes from my flawed ability to sound out words I don’t know how to spell myself. I’m very much like Orin in this case, I would rather just have someone tell me how to spell then waste my time sounding it out and still not spelling it correctly. There were a few times in the class when students would ask me to spell a word for them, and although I knew I should work with the students and sound it out with them, I just wrote the word in question on the board for them to see. Straying from this approach and really working on not just giving students the answers to spelling is one of my major goals for my future growth as a literacy and language
Through this work I was able to learn many things about Adela as a reader, as a writer, and as a speller. As a reader, Adela had decent fluency when reading out loud. She read in two or three word phrases which allowed for a relatively easy understanding from a listener’s perspective. She was also very good at self-correction when reading out loud. When she misread or omitted a word, she would go back to the beginning of the sentence and start over. Adela was a much more confident reader than writer. She had to dedicate much more time, focus, and energy when writing than when reading. I saw this specifically when she working on writing her book. She had great ideas and conveyed them well when I asked her about it, but it took her a long time to write out the ideas she was thinking. I think a part of her struggle and low confidence as a reader comes from her spelling ability. She was given a spelling inventory where she correctly spelled 11 of 25 words given. the majority of words spelled correctly were the easier ones at the beginning of the list. After administering the spelling inventory and completing the feature guide, it was found that Adela is at the middle of within word pattern spelling stage. This caused some frustration for Adela when trying to write her