The literacy area that will be discussed in this assessment is the student’s writing. When a child is learning how to write, they undergo five discovery stages, which are essential to their writing development. The first discovery stage, “I can make marks” the child realizes that they can control the form of the marks being made. The second discovery stage, “Writing vs. drawling”, the child realizes that the marks used for writing look different than those used in drawling.
The third discovery stage, “noticing the features of print symbols”, the child becomes aware of the different shapes used to form letters such as loops, straight line and slanted lines. The fourth discovery stage, “there are a limited number of letter forms”, the child realizes that there is an established set of letters and children stop using “mock letters” and being to use only letter forms.
The final stage, the fifth discovery point, “letters map on to the sounds of words,” the child makes the connection of the “alphabetic principle” and the children learn that particular letters are used to represent certain sounds when adults model and explain (writing development). Looking at a child’s writing is very important because it lets the teacher know where the students stands compared to the class and the grade level. When a teacher looks at the writing samples, they can see the external and content of the paper and grasp an idea as the where the child is at writing.
At the second grade level, students are working on developing their writing skills such as how legible their handwriting is, making sure they are using the correct punctuation and capitalization, and broadening their spelling. The purpose of observing a students writing is to see how well the students demonstrate those concepts listed above (second grade). When looking at the writing sample it is also important to understand the progression of spelling in the writing. The progression of writing is broken down into three stages, semiphonic spelling, phonetic spelling and transitional spelling.
Semiphonic stage is the last stage in the discovery stages, where the use of the beginning sounds is introduced and the child uses the ending sound. The second stage, phonetic spelling is using to letters to represent the most salient sounds in a words. Also, use of letters to represent the middle sound in words such as first consonants, then long vowels and then short vowels (writing development). In first and second grade, school instruction leads students into “transitional” and then, eventually, to “conventional spelling” (writing development).
The third and final stage, the transitional spelling, the child realizes she must think beyond what words sound like and consider what they look like. (Writing development). When looking at the child’s writing sample, the teacher should consider the external and content. External features include spacing, punctuation and capitalization, and the spelling of words phonetically. Content features include order and organization, how coherent or fluid the work is, complete thoughts, details, strong vocabulary and transitions. While observing Matthew’s writing style, I was impressed how excited he was to sit down and write.
Most of the others in the class were walking around getting their stuff together, however, Matthew sat right down and got out his work and started to write. Matthew was very excited to read me his spin of the Fairytale “The Three Little King at School. ” When looking at Matthews’s drawings, it is clear that the story takes place in a school and matches what they story is about. When the assignment was due, he handed his fairytale in on time and was able to present his tale to myself. After analyzing Matthews’s work, I have a greater understand of how he writes and the ways in which I can improve his riting.
Based off my knowledge of this content and from the PowerPoint, I would say that Matthew is between a phonetic and transitional speller. When looking at the writing, I noticed that Matthew spelled many words phonetically, meaning he sounded out all the sounds he heard. Some examples of words he spelled phonetically are, posit for postit, bineders for binders, nouck for knock and intih for until. I say that he is between a phonetic and transitional speller because for the exception of some words, all of the other words were spelled correctly (writing development).
I have seen great improvement in Matthew’s writing since I have been in the classroom. Most of his spelling was done phonetically, however, he is progressing into the transitional spelling where he realizes that he must think beyond the words “sound like” and what they actually “look like. ” When looking at Matthews writing I can tell that he is very strong with his external features and making sure his spacing of his words on the paper is correct and the normal size. There are some instances where an “N” looks like an “H. Matthew used the correct punctuation and capitalization throughout the writing sample. The framework and the body structure of his paper are well done. However, when it comes to the content of the paper, Matthew is lacking some details. There was very good organization and order in the paper and I was able to follow what was happening and what was going to happen next. Matthew was able to use complete thoughts and ideas in his writing. I thought it was great that I could see the pattern of the fairytale of the Three Little Pigs.
I was able to see how creative Matthew was and how he was able to spin off the original story and make it into his own. I could tell that he put a lot of thought into adding detail into his story. One thing that I would recommend is that he uses stronger words when using details. There was also evidence of transition words in his writing, which is great, but some of the spelling was wrong which made it hard to understand the transition (class notes 3/31). For an instructional recommendation, I would recommend some minor skills that will enhance Matthew’s writing ability.
The one main concept I would focus on with Matthew is slowing down how fast he is writing. By slowing down his writing, he is able to think about what is actually being written. Some students think so fast that they are not able to understand what they are thinking to write it down. I noticed some common indications that he was going to fast and that was that some of his letters are written the wrong way or that he confused come letters for other letters. Towards the end of the story I noticed that there was more issues with the way the letters faced.
I think that this could be because he was rushing to get his story done and was not focusing on what he was writing down. Some example of this is when he said “howe” and he meant to say “home” or he wrote “haqqy” instead of writing “happy. ” These were just some of the minor errors that I noticed when reading his work. The next recommendation that I would suggest is to build Matthew’s vocabulary by introducing new words that he can use in his writing. Matthew could use new words that would help him describe situations in his story.
By having descriptive words, it will add more detail to the story and allow the readers to picture what is going on in the story. Even though this is only second grade, the students can use more descriptive words such as cruel or nasty instead of saving mean. By building a broader dictionary, Matthew will be able to transition his thoughts better and make the writing piece more fluid. According to About the Authors, on page 109, over time, we hope to see children developing a sense of self as writers, as well as personal writing process that works for them.
I was able to see Matthews self come out in the piece because he was using things that happen in his life in his story (109). When looking at a piece of writing to see what the child knows about crafting a piece of literature, there are some predictable line of thinking guiding our assessment, do I see any evidence in this piece that the child is trying writing ideas we’ve discussed in mini lessons or share time (126). I think that Matthew took what he was taught in class about the fairytales and applies the themes to his own writing.