Week 7

Action research started this week, and oh what fun it was. I am doing a lot of stuff with spelling, and my wondering is based around the learning of spelling words from my students. Though it may seem difficult for some people to find interesting activities to do with spelling, I found some in my first week that I will use for the rest of my career. The one activity that I loved best,m and I believe all of my students loved best was "shaving cream spelling". We did this the day before the students had their spelling test because I thought that something like this would help the spelling words stick in their head for the next day. I went around to all of the students desks and sprayed a bit of shaving cream, then had them use the hand that they write with to smear the cream all over their desk. I would then say one of their spelling words, and they would have to spell it in the shaving cream with their finger. To ensure that all of the students were paying attention, and spelling the words correctly, I would call on a student to spell the word aloud after everyone had a chance to try to spell it. The students absolutely loved this activity, and it seemed to pay off.

Out of 25 students, 13 of them scored a 100 on the test this week. This was the highest number of 100's that we have had the whole year on a spelling test. One of our students had consistently been scoring in the 40, 50, 60 range, and she scored a 92 on this test. It makes me wonder if my activities actually had something to do with the great success for this week, did the students just get more help at home this week, or did the activities just excite the students about spelling that they tried harder. Whatever the case, they loved the activities, and they all had success on this test.