Writing Samples

In my 3rd grade field placement, I collected two writing samples to analyze. The students were prompted to write about their favorite season. The first student, I will call him Ryan, had a good writing piece about summer. Here is a sample of his writing:

“…we can eat icecrem my favorite icecrem is spencalls whith vinelly icecrem in the cone. We can go to the bech and we can srim in the water and lay in the sun and have coold drenks.”

This writing sample has many spelling errors. The main thing I noticed in this piece was his vowel use within some words. For example, Ryan is unfamiliar with the vowel team found in ‘cream’ and spells ‘crem’ instead. Likewise, he doesn’t spell the vowel team, ‘ea’ for the word ‘beach’ and spells ‘bech’ instead. I also noticed his spelling of the word ‘cold’ as ‘coold’. These vowel mistakes seem to place Ryan in stage 3 spelling stage because he is still confusing spelling patterns within words. He is still working on his long vowel sounds and needs to work on vowel teams as well.

The second writing piece comes from another student named Jessica. She was also prompted to write about her favorite season. Unlike Ryan, she chose to write about the winter being her favorite. Here is a sample of her writing:

“I enjoy winter because every week I go sleding on the fantastic, steep hill. I also build snowmen with my brother and sister with buttons, berries, and some carrots. And the best thing I do is skii. We go skiing sometimes…”

Jessica wrote a great piece and had overall good spelling use. The issue she is still having is with rules for inflectional endings. I noticed that she indeed knows about some of the more difficult rules for word endings. For example, when she spells the word, ‘berries’, she knows how to change the word, ‘berry’ into plural by dropping the ‘y’ and adding ‘ies’. Likewise, she knows that the word, ‘skiing’ requires you to add an ‘ing’ even though the word ends up having two ‘I’s. But Jessica made a few mistakes with this concept as well. For instance, she spelled ‘sledding’ as ‘sleding’. It seems she is unfamiliar with the ending rule for that word, that it requires you to add a ‘ding’ to ‘sled’. These mistakes place Jessica in stage 4 of spelling development as she is already working and seems ready to learn more on inflectional endings to words.