Writing Samples

Well, last the last time I went to my placement was on January 26th (because of the snow days). At that time there were still second graders in the class. Those are who I collected my writing samples from. They looked through a book, the story of the ants and the grasshopper. They were supposed to write their predictions of what the story was going to be about.

One student has just entered the Spanish Immersion program this year. While they are supposed to do everything in Spanish, she resorted to writing in English because she feels more comfortable with it and therefore can get more across that way. She wrote "the ants are culeting food. The gase haper is going to want some of his food. the ants mit get a plan for the grass  haper to not get ther food." I would classify this student as Stage 3: Within-Word Pattern Spelling (based on chapter 5 in Literacy for the 21st Century). In this stage, students can spell most one syllable short-vowel words. This is shown in her correct spelling of the following words: is, to, want, of, his, get, plan, for, not. She is still learning some of the more complex consonant patterns such as "ght" and adding a consonant when adding a suffix (hopper). However, she has an understanding of some inflectional endings (-s, -ing), which is part of stage 4. For some words that are probably less used in her vocabulary, she is spelling them phonetically (like "culeting", for collecting).

Another student, who has been in the program since preschool, wrote "La zatamonte vasa vivir con los ormicas. Las ormicas vasa durmer con la zatamonte. Las ormicas y la zatamontes van a conptner." I had a hard time classifying this but I would say he is also in Stage 3. "Ormicas" should be "hormigas" but when listening to the word, one does not hear the 'h' as it is silent. Also, his 'zatamontes' is meant to be 'saltamontes' but the spanish s and z sounds are very similar and difficult to differentiate and learn the rules to. So, I feel that he is recognizing spelling patterns. He is not yet to stage 4 in that he doesn't fully understand endings. (I feel that the Spanish number and gender concordance would fall into this category as well - he was not consistant with number in that 'la ormicas' should be 'las hormigas' and 'la zatamontes' should be 'la saltamonte.') 

Since I feel that it is difficult to explain these Spanish examples to people who may not have any basis of understanding of Spanish, I collected additional samples of the first graders yesterday to try a little more. The students compared and contrasted two books about Martin Luther King Jr. using a venn diagram. One student wrote "aldulto. su esposa. Rosa Parks." for one book, and "BeBe. Piano. hermanos.yhermanas. su tia. su abuela." for the other. Then for both she wrote, "las personas no estan Iguales. african americano. Padres. la suena." I thought it was very interesting that she placed a period after each thought although only one was actually a sentence. She correctly placed an accent over the second 'e' in bebe, so it makes me wonder where this would fall in the stages. I would say that she is beginning to move from Stage 2 to Stage 3 becuase her spellings are not abbreviated and she seems to understand how to use consonant blends. However, the one word sentences aren't able to show much. Within the words, she is showing vowel patterns (for the Spanish language).