Week of Oct. 3

Hello Families!
We will begin a new adventure in vocabulary this week and I wanted to share the program with you and explain what’s going on. Last week, I assessed 5th grade students for phoneme awareness in order to gauge each child’s awareness of word structure and spelling patterns. It was an eye-opening activity, to say the least. It appears that, even if a student has a very well developed vocabulary, their understanding of spelling and phonics rules are sorely lacking. So, I am going to have an intensive couple weeks of workshops and centers to remind students of these rules. By the 5th grade, students should be focusing on roots and affixes (prefixes and suffixes), but we cannot move into more advanced vocabulary ideas until we have the basics down pat. I am hoping to be up to speed in a few weeks, in order to continue building higher level concepts.
I am using several programs to aid my speed course in phonics. Words Their Way was the initial assessment. Students will be placed into spelling/vocabulary groups based on their scores in my initial investigation. The groups are: Letter Name (LN), Within Word (WW), Syllable Junction (SJ) and Derivational Constancy (DC). I will write your students group in their agenda this week, please look for it. As they master the concepts, they will be placed in the next highest group. My goal is to have all students working in either SJ or DC by the end the month. 5C should all be working in DC.
We will not have spelling/vocabulary words this week, but that does not mean we won’t be working on vocabulary! Instead of a test on Friday, we will work on centers in the classroom, have phonics instruction in class and peer-edit our Fairytales in an effort to spot some of the simpler errors we all are making in writing. I encourage you to work with your student on this. Some of the websites I have found that include games, sorting and other various activities are:
http://www.eduplace.com/kids/sv/books/content/wordsort/
http://www.sadlier-oxford.com/phonics/family.cfm
http://www.spellingcity.com/spelling-games-vocabulary-games.html
Please encourage your student to visit these sites for extra practice.
This week, we continue reading Secret Garden and Wee Free Men.
Some of these words/sounds may seem simple, but classroom assessment indicates many students do not have these skills mastered. It shouldn’t take long to grasp these concepts, but they must be firmly understood in order to move forward with higher level vocabulary. Spelling and understanding word structure is imperative for fluency and comprehension in reading.
I also encourage you to visit my blog for updates and ideas; the link is on Neuse Charter’s website.
Also, please come by and support me as I join other staff members in a spirited game of volleyball against the NCS Cougars this Thursday at 4:30. It should be a lot of fun to watch teachers embarrass themselves  Hope to see you then!