Where do the lessons come from?
Weekly lessons will follow curriculum skills pertaining to phonology, handwriting, word attack skills, and word parts such as prefixes, suffiixes, roots, etcetera. There are lists available on-line at Spelling City to practice spelling. Go to www.spellingcity.com/doyle4/.
Lessons on Mondays will focus on identifying the skill for the week. Throughout the week students will work on applying these skills and exploring to find other words that employ them. The grade may be a written test or handwriting rubric. Written tests will consist of 10 items: 5-6 words to spell wholly and 3 others to either mark sounds, mark syllables, or identify letters that make a particular sound or follow a particular rule, and finally there will be a dictation sentence to write. Students will have a word list or other text in front of them for handwriting assignments so that the assessment is strictly focusing on penmanship.
We will also work on cursive and practice more and more as the year goes on. Cursive or script handwriting is once again a Louisiana standard and is required to be taught in thrid and fourth grades. Please encourage your child to practice handwriting at home in print and cursive.
Classwork VS Homework
Classwork will include 3 assignments involving each student's personal choices from a weekly Tic-Tac-Toe activity sheet. Activity choices will vary from week to week and may be written or done on-line.
All chosen assignments not completed in class MUST be completed as homework. These are expected to be completed that night. All classwork assignments will be due on Fridays. Exceptions or changes may be made to this for shortened school weeks.
Homework includes reviewing words nightly regardless of whether written work was already completed in class or not. Studying is a necessity, especially as the year progresses. The words get much harder as the year goes on.
Grading
Tests will be given weekly on Fridays. Again, the grade may be a written test or handwriting rubric. They may be required to write in manuscript (print) or in script (cursive). Grades may occasionally be taken from classwork.
Grades in spelling count for a small portion of the speech/written language grade which is overall 40% of the ELA grade and will be averaged in with reading and English grades.