This comment on and spelling of spelling – seplling – is derived directly from a childhood writing assignment. Currently, as a special educator, my partner teacher and I find this old declaration to be of major interest to us today. This interest manifests itself in two ways – grave difficulty with spelling and the lack of love for writing, to which struggling with encoding is a great contributor.
We are making a concerted effort to make our resource room be more than “that room where some kids go”. We want it to be the place to be where learning is fun all the time. While we service students who have an IEP, we are fortunate to be in a place where we include any child who could benefit from additional, focused VAKT instruction.
Our room is set up like a community with a construction zone, writing café, park, health clinic, outlaw word jail, basketball court, math zone, etc. In these neighborhood areas, instruction is interwoven through games, activities, brainstorming, etc. Now that we have been introduced to the Spelling Bundle our minds are stimulated as we envision our community growing with opportunities - opportunities to slip in much needed focused and engaging spelling instruction with our other activities.
One of the products included in the Spelling Bundle, Two Wise Owls, seemed to particularly compliment a technique we currently use, Visualizing and Verbalizing. This is a strategy we use in order to teach reading comprehension. This strategy incorporates a series of “structure words” that help students attend to details and create vivid visualizations with their minds eye while reading text.
In the early stages of this strategy students utilize pictures to gain an understanding of the structure words. Currently, the pictures are provided by us from magazines, calendars, etc. We feel that if the students could use the camera to take photographs themselves they will feel a sense of ownership, thus furthering the impact of this strategy. For example, one of the more challenging structure words is perspective. Students can better understand the concept of this structure word if they had the opportunity to take several photographs of a single item each from a different perspective.
To our delight, Visualizing and Verbalizing skills quickly carried over to the students’ writing. Their written responses became more detailed. When additional details were needed to enhance meaning, students referenced a structure word list to consider size, shape, perspective, etc. Once the student considered them, they could quickly add any overlooked details thus improving their response. Our incorporation of the activities (for example, SuperSpell, Spell Track, etc.) in the Spelling Bundle into our learning environment will further improve our students’ ability to clearly communicate their detailed ideas through correct writing.
In addition to our efforts during the school day we offer writing tutoring before school. In an attempt to make this less stigmatizing our tutoring is not referred to as tutoring. In fact we are a club, the Communication Club. This club participates in authentic writing experiences that not only benefit students’ writing ability but also benefit self-esteem. Currently, our club is sponsoring a school wide bowl-a-thon in order to raise money to help children with cancer. This undertaking provided a variety of opportunities for writing (writing business letters, making promotional posters, writing scripts for morning announcements, etc.) and we feel that the offerings of this grant could help us to enhance this experience as well as the students’ learning. We are always on the lookout for ways to "teach" skills in a way that fits our philosophy of meaningful learning. A camera would have enabled them to incorporate photographs on to their posters and into their Power Point presentations. Practice with spelling strategies would serve to enhance the writing practice, resulting in successful writing pieces.
As a follow up activity our students are creating craft bags for patients with cancer. When children are admitted to the hospital they will be presented with a brown bag with materials and directions for making a craft - all prepared and supplied by our students. The patient will follow the written directions made by our students in order to complete the craft. Our students can utilize the camera to add pictures to their written directions as they carefully plan and follow through with accurate steps to perform the task.
Our idea produces two products: one tangible -the craft bags - and one intangible - the process of developing the steps to achieve a successful community service activity. The idea of extending and enhancing our students’ growth through engaging, meaningful activities is extremely exciting to us. Our minds went into overdrive as we learned about this grant and the products offered by Tool Factory
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