Katie Martin

CURR 611
Words Their Way Write-Up
October 29, 2015
Dani is a fourth grade student, who is very attentive and motivated to learn. In reading,
Dani reads with fluency and expression and can for the most part accurately read words, but has
trouble understanding what she reads and determining the significant elements from a text. In
writing, Dani brings creative ideas, but is inconsistent in her organization and conventions, such
as punctuation and capitalization. During the assessment, she was very focused on attempting to
spell the words I correctly. I let her know that this was not for a grade and would help me learn
about what strategies we could use in the future to assist her. She sounded out the words as she
wrote them and seemed to realize that she was getting some of the words wrong. Some of the
sentences that contained the words seemed to confuse her. Nevertheless, she tried her best.
Dani had some difficulty with other vowels, missing the word marched by spelling it
mrach. She also demonstrated minor difficulty with inflected endings. Dani did not double the
p before adding -ing in shopping. She was slightly more challenged by the words that contained
unaccented final syllables, such as le, or, and ar, as in bottle, favor, and cellar. This was
fairly consistent across the five words that contained this pattern. More specifically, Dani spelled
bottle as bottal, favor as faver, ripen as ripend and cellar as seler. It appears that she
relies on the -er ending when she is unsure. The only correct unaccented final syllable she
spelled correctly was shower correctly.
In addition, Dani had the most difficulty with harder suffixes and bases or roots and was
only able to spell one out of the ten words that contained either harder suffixes or bases and roots
correctly. When examining her spelling of these words, it appears as though she is relying on her

knowledge of sounds to do her best to spell the word. For example, with a word such as pleasure,
Dani spelled it plesher, indicating that she knows the consonant blend at the beginning but has
more difficulty with the digraph and harder suffix at the end. Another example of this can be
found in Danis spelling of civilize. She spelled the word as sivlyes. Because this word is made
up of a harder suffix and bases or roots, she did not spell any part of the word correctly.
However, she did recognize that the word began with an s sound and used her knowledge of
the rest of the letter sounds to spell the word. With Danis power score of 9/25 along with an
examination of her errors, she is in the late within word pattern of spelling, perhaps in the early
stage of syllables and affixes.
One activity from which Dani would benefit could be Double Scoop. This could be
played in a small group in which the students engage in a board game that allows them to
determine if various words need to drop the e, double the consonant, or not change at all when
adding an inflectional ending. This would be helpful for Dani so that she could engage in more
practice with inflectional endings (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 2012). Another
activity that would help Dani is Double Crazy Eights, which reviews vowel patterns, syllable
junctures, and unaccented syllables. Students each receive eight word cards and, in order to play
their turn, must match the card placed before theirs either by patterns, stress, or unaccented
syllable. This would allow Dani to not only review her syllable junctures, but also her vowel
patterns and unaccented syllables (Bear et al., 2012).

References
Bear, D.R., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2012). Words their way: Word
study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction (5th ed.). Boston: Pearson
Education.