Mini Strategy

The mini strategy lesson I found to be something very beneficial. It was kind of cool to be able to focus on one student and see the best way to strategies to teach them a certain material. I just did a simple spelling activity. He tends to mix up a few of the phonemes when reading and he tends to spell words with sounds that are not there or he tends to actually take out sounds. For instance “storm” he would spell “strm.” So I noticed it was that he was not sounding out correctly. He was just going off what he heard and not actually sounding out and saying each sound in the word.  So what I tried to do what to have him practice the spelling words he had for the week by doing things like spelling the words and saying each letter and sound. So he would slowly write the word saying each letter he was writing then he would slowly sound out the word and say it. We would do this for each word 5 times so that he would be able to say it then go through and spell it. I took this repetition approach because I do not think he was getting the practice with them he needed at home. So in order to give him more experience with the word and spelling it I thought by having him repeat the word how to spell it and the sounds would help him learn how to spell them. Something my CT added to it which was interesting was to have him spell them out with play dough that way the student had to feel the letters as he was spelling and would help him remember them. We would perform these tasks for as long as we needed him to spell all of his words it usually took about 35-40 minutes. Then sometimes we would have like a pretest for spelling to see what words he would have to work on more. Once I would correct it we would go over the spelling of the words again. I would also instruct him at home to maybe spell out the words he got wrong more times than the ones he got right so he can maybe not make the same little mistakes he made on the pretest. I know that he might not really try them at home but I felt as if he saw himself improving on the pretests, which he did, he would want to try harder at home and perform better on his spelling test.

 What I learned from this was that students can mess up on the smallest thing and the best thing to do is to start from the basics and work up. So for my student I start with sounding each letter, then saying the letter, then spelling it. This way we can either reaffirm basic fact they already know or help them learn aspects they may struggle with that we as teachers may not notice right away. I also learned that we can make these activities fun like we did with the play dough, my student loved playing with the play dough and making the letters. I also saw the benefits of just simple one on one instruction the students seem to enjoy it and it is a way for teachers to better communicate and get to know their own students.