Dictation for spelling?

I have been experimenting on and off this year with using dictation for spelling. Having tried various programmes in my classroom - Chunk, Check, Cheer, Joy Allock and more recently Kiwiphonics, I continue to be frustrated with children's lack of ability to transfer spelling knowledge into thier writing. I have found various blog postings about dictation - see below, and also have informal feedback from teachers that it is successful so I am hoping that this works. I am hoping that dictation will help children to more accurately record the sounds they can hear - particularly word endings - ed, ing etc and also using the chunks of sounds that they know make the sound. After we have dictated a piece, the children and I work through it together and they are becoming more skilled at identifying spelling patterns as we read through it after the dictation.

http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2008/06/dictation-goes-web-20.html
http://higherupandfurtherin.blogspot.com/2006/09/teaching-spelling-through-studied.html
http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/JocelynJames/418875/

Writing

I attended a fiction writing workshop run by Owen Marshall this weekend and have some great ideas for process writing in my classroom. We have not done a lot of narrative writing in the class this year yet so I am excited about really getting into it.

Blogging - what are we using it for

I picked this post up from the ICT in English NZ site. Konrad Glogowski is completing his PhD thesis on the use of blogging communities in the classroom. There are some interesting discussion points here on children reflecting on the use of blogs.
As the class blog is now up and running effectively, I am now wanting to work on the quality of children's responses. In order to get meaningful responses, we need to think carefully about the quality of the blog post itself. What is the intention of the post? - is it to share with parents about topics covered, give children futher opportunities to revise, seek feedback on work?
With writing for example, if children are expecting responses they need to be sharing their learning goal to encourage comments and responses that are valid to the children's learning.
I'm taking it all in small steps, but I now want children to be judging the quality of the blog postings on the quality of the responses we get not on the number of comments we received. I am also wanting to encourage parents to be using the blog more often too, making it more of a learning community. Some of the responses we have had to our inquiry questions have been great - links to websites that have provided children with answers to their action questions.
Some great stuff on Konrad Glogowski's blog, I also enjoyed the June 08 entry on finding music to accompany books and the lack of need for evaluation!

Written Langauge

As part of the learning team's action research on assessment, we are looking at improving our use of self assessment. Learning intentions and success criteria are used regularly as is self assessment, however the general concensus is that we rarely collect and use data from self assessment to inform our own future teaching nor do we spend time working through discrepencies of children's actual ability and their perception. The general conclusion is that higher ability children tend to be harder on themselves when self assessing and lower ability children tend to assess their work at a higher level. We are going to spend more time developing the success criteria from the exemplars with the children. Hopefully this will develop more ownership over the expecatations and help the children to be more aware of what is expected. As a learning team we are going to analyse children's ability to self assess their own work and hope to see improvement over the term as their understanding of the expectation is increased as is their ability to more accurately and honestly appraise their work. I have been running optional 'writing workshops' in my class. For example workshops on speech marks, using similes, using different sentence starters. Hopefully this will help children to make more informed decisions about which workshops they will attend.

News

I recieved the Uniysis Kidz Connect grant to start a class news programme and have started work on this.
The class completed a simple current events test as baseline data for me to show their understanding. This included school, local, national and internation questions. We also spend a bit of time looking at the local newspaper and thinking about news on tv to develop some categories on news. This can be seen on the voice thread on my class blog. Tomorrow we have Peter O'Neill, tutor from the Aoraki Polytech Journalism course coming to talk to us about what news is and how news can be gathered. Next step is to create our starting sequence and backdrop for the news. Then we will start looking for some news to report on around the school. Still need to work out green screen technology.

Spelling

An ongoing concern with children's writing for me has always been with their transference of spelling knowledge into their daily writing. I have got some ideas for word study from Words Their Way and am going to trial these as a reading activity. This is to do with sorting words into groups with long and short vowel sounds. I am also going to use early readers to give children daily dictation as anecdotally I have heard that this improves children's spelling.. Yet to find evidence in research on this.

Voice Thread

We have tried our first few voice threads in the classroom. Children are always motivated by a new tool to use in the classroom.
Apart from a few technical difficulties in recording voices, the possibilities across the curriculum are great! For maths the children can be describing strategies for solving number problems and use the drawing tool to write it on. For kiwiphonics we recorded us saying the words from complex code lists and literacy sharing opinions and ideas. There is still a need for children to practice clear articulation.