Welcome to our book study of The Writing Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Writers by Jennifer Serravallo! I am joining forces with some other fabulous teacher bloggers to discuss the writing strategies we come across in this AMAZING professional text!
Because this book isn't your typical professional development book filled with individual "chapters" of narrative, each teacher blogger will be giving you a glimpse into the 10 goals that are represented in the text. Each goal area is filled with many valuable strategies that will help you to support and guide your students as they become better writers. Keep in mind, we are only highlighting a FEW strategies in each section. There are over 300 strategies in the whole book!
You can find my posts for previous sections below:
It is important for students to learn how words are spelled so that others can comprehend what has been written.
Serravallo cautions that we shouldn't assume that spelling errors mean that students are being careless, but that they are writing the way they know how. She suggested using a spelling assessment, such as the spelling inventory from Words Their Way, in order to learn more about your students' spelling understandings.
When choosing this as a goal for your students to work on, you may want to consider students who:
* show they are ready for this strategy based on spelling inventory.
* have writing samples with a high frequency of certain types of spelling errors.
Focus Strategy 1: Vowel Charts for the Middle of Words
This strategy teaches the child to say a word they are having trouble spelling slowly. They should first record the beginning sound. Then they say it again listening for the middle of the word. They check a vowel chart to see which letter or letter combinations might make the sound.
Here is an example of a vowel chart from The Clever Classroom.
Focus Strategy 2: Use Your Resources to Spell
When a student tries to spell a word (or attempts to correct the spelling of a word), they should ask themselves, "Have I seen this word written somewhere else before?"
They should check resources such as books, word walls, personal dictionaries, etc.
Focus Strategy 3: Use Words You Know to Spell Unknown Words
This strategy asks students to think about words they know how to spell that might sound like a word they know. For example, if they were trying to spell the word "exit" they might think about the word "it" to help them spell it.
This page features prompts students can use to help them spell including these strategies and several others. You might want to print it out for your students to refer to.
If you would like to purchase the book mentioned above, you can find it here.
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Make sure to visit Katie over at Running for Literacy. She is our official hostess for this week, and she has some more strategies and great ideas for you!
If you would like to link up your own blog posts about this book, feel free to do so in the linky below! Don't forget to check out the other bloggers' posts as well as they write them for even more ideas!
