Primary Spelling Inventory

Today in The Learning Academy in Ms. Swan's 4th grade class, I administered the Primary Spelling Inventory test to my student Jackson from 8:25-8:35. This test is used to figure out how well the students can decode and spell common and then more difficult words.

The primary level of the test, there are 3 levels, consists of 26 words to say to the children and then have them write down how they think it is spelt. In the instructions though they say that if the student gets 5-6 words incorrect then to stop where you are to prevent discouraging the students anymore. I ended up stopping Jackson at word 18 because he had spelt 6 words wrong. Jackson had gotten 12/18 given correct, but 12/26 of total words including the words that I did not give him. The list of the words and how he spelt them were:

1. fan - fan 10. shine - shine

2. pet - pet 11. dream - brem

3. dig - dig 12. blade - dlod

4. rob - rob 13. coach - coach

5. hope - hope 14. fright - frit

6. wait - what 15. chewed - chod

7. gum - gum 16. crawl - crol

8. sled - sled 17. wishes - wishes

9. stick - stick 18. thorn - thorn

After we gave our student the test, we used the Words Their Way Primary Spelling Inventory Feature Guide to grade their tests and figure out where in the spectrum they are. This chart takes each word and gives significant consonants, vowels, blends, digraphs, etc. a significant amount of points as well as if the student correctly spells the entire word they get an extra point. You base the amount of words you look at on the amount of words that they spelled in total. As you go across the columns and down the rows, when you get to a column that has more than 2 parts of the word incorrect, that's the stage that you will classify the student in.

Jackson started to struggle in the common long vowels in 5-6 letter words. He only spelt 3/7 parts involving common long vowels correctly in this section so this tells me that Jackson is in the Middle Within Word Pattern Stage. He had a total of 33/44 feature points and 12/18 words spelt correctly. This shows me that Jackson needs work on words that have two vowels in it. I also noticed that Jackson had significant problems with the words dream and blade. He was given the words dig and rob and didn't have any problems with the d's and b's in these two words but when he got to the words dream and blade he spelt them brem and dlod. This shows me that he reversed his letters, which is common for younger kids but as they grow older they are supposed to grow out of it. It also tells me that Jackson may have difficulty with blends or that once the word gets longer and looks harder to spell he gets intimidated by it.

#Primary #Spelling #Inventory #dream #blade #letterreversal