This week I worked a lot with small groups, I was pulling groups in math to give extra support on pictographs and pulling small groups in shared reading to help my students learn about character traits, for this blog post, I'm going to write about how much I learned when it came to pulling meaningful phonics groups. We gave our students a spelling test earlier this year and to grade these spelling tests, I used a spelling inventory worksheet to determine where they needed extra support. Based on the words they got wrong and where in the word they were misspelling it, that is where they got the extra support. Some were put in groups to work on vowels, others may of needed help with inflected endings, and some still needed support with the blending of sounds. This week I worked with my second phonics group and taught them about the silent e. To start off my small group lesson, I showed the students the word bake and explained to them how important the silent e is because if he is a helper. I taught them that the silent e makes the vowel say its name. In the word bake, the silent e makes the a say its name. In my small group I had the students make sound boxes on their paper, sound boxes are simply a 4x4 box and after they drew their box, we started to punch out each word. We started with the word cake. To punch out a word, you keep on palm in the air and make fist with your other hand. Then hit your fist to your palm with each sound you hear. C-A-K...those are the sounds you hear, so the student would punch out the sounds 3 times then write each sound they heard in each box of their sound box. So in the first box would be the C, then would be the A, then the K sound, I then instructed them that the only way the A was able to say its name was because of the silent e, so they would add the helper in the last sound box. This lesson went over extremely well and during independent reading that day, my students were getting up to show me all the silent e's in their books they were reading. One student when she showed me the word she found, she goes, "Ms. Weber thank you for teaching me that the silent e gives the vowel its name." I was so proud she remember the rule and was thankful for the knowledge she had gained because of me.
What a great feeling! There's nothing better (in my opinion) when students apply something that they learned and they make a point to show it to you!!! How are you keeping track of your students' progress in your small group?
To track their progression, I gave the whole class a spelling test. I assessed the spelling test with a spelling inventory sheet and that is how I created my small group, these students in particular missed all the words that had a silent e in them. After working with this group for a few days, I gave an informal assessment on silent e words to see if the concept had stuck and that the silent e is the reason why the vowel says its name. After grading the informal assessment I gave, I saw that 2 of my students got an 18/20 on spelling silent e words correctly and my other student got a 16/20. This shows me that these few students are making progression.