Writing Sample

My writing sample is a captain’s log based off a book that my 5th grade class is reading. The students were required to write 14 entries over the span of a month. I believe that the student whose sample I have is at stage 4 of spelling development based on the words that I saw her misspelling. In this stage of development, students learn how to add suffixes, which was something this student seemed to have a little bit of a problem with. She spells most words correctly, but often forgets the –e in the suffix –ed. For example, she spelled the word “happened” as “happend” and “hammered” as “hammerd”. She also spelled “gathered” as “gatherd” and remembered as “rememberd”. It seems like all the words that she does this to are ones that end in a consonant and then the –ed is added. At the same time, she sometimes spells words correctly that end in a consonant and add an –ed. She spelled “called” and “returned” correctly.

The student knows to change the endings of some words in order to add –ed. For example, she spelled “tried” correctly. She spelled most other words in the piece correctly, with minor mistakes such as switching letters around (“moeny” instead of “money” and “cheif” instead of “chief”) or adding the same consonant (“begginning” instead of “beginning” and “harrassed” instead of “harassed”). She definitely understood skills developed in stage 3 of spelling development, such as long vowel spelling patterns. She spelled words such as “more”, “strange”, “have”, and “breeze” correctly every time. I think the most helpful thing to focus on in teaching her a lesson would be the addition of the suffix –ed to words, especially ones with a root word ending in “r” or “n”.