Word Family/Word Work
In Kindergarten, we teach reading and writing at the beginning of the year by focusing on letters and sounds and how they blend together to make words. Of course, there are those words we call “sight words” because kids often times have to know them by “sight” rather than relying upon their letter-sound knowledge to decode. Those words simply do not always follow the phonetic rules and have letter combinations that do not follow the traditional sounds..
When students have gained enough phonetic knowledge to begin building words, we teach though word families such as –at, -am, -it, -og, -un. Teaching children about patterns in words helps them become better readers and writers.
When assessing their knowledge of word families, various data are gained from one simple assessment including letter formation, letter placement, letter recognition, letter-sound relationships, word patterns, and word meaning. Depending on the differentiation of instruction, students may also be using the words in sentences in which different skill data is gathered: capitalization, punctuation, and spacing between words.
A word family assessment is much more than the traditional “weekly spelling test” that you might know. Encourage your children to read and write daily by using their word building skills.
In Kindergarten, we teach reading and writing at the beginning of the year by focusing on letters and sounds and how they blend together to make words. Of course, there are those words we call “sight words” because kids often times have to know them by “sight” rather than relying upon their letter-sound knowledge to decode. Those words simply do not always follow the phonetic rules and have letter combinations that do not follow the traditional sounds..
When students have gained enough phonetic knowledge to begin building words, we teach though word families such as –at, -am, -it, -og, -un. Teaching children about patterns in words helps them become better readers and writers.
When assessing their knowledge of word families, various data are gained from one simple assessment including letter formation, letter placement, letter recognition, letter-sound relationships, word patterns, and word meaning. Depending on the differentiation of instruction, students may also be using the words in sentences in which different skill data is gathered: capitalization, punctuation, and spacing between words.
A word family assessment is much more than the traditional “weekly spelling test” that you might know. Encourage your children to read and write daily by using their word building skills.