Pennington Publishing Blog

Differentiated Spelling Instruction

Differentiated Spelling Instruction Grades 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are assessment-based, grade level spelling programs built upon conventional spelling rules and developmental spelling patterns. Plus, the program includes all the printable and digital resources teachers need to re-teach the previous grade level spelling patterns that your students have not yet mastered through individualized instruction. Developing an efficient weekly spelling plan that differentiates instruction for all of your students is a challenging task for even the best veteran teacher, but help has arrived! There is no better spelling program for your grade level students, GATE students, special ed, ESL/ELD, and below grade level students. Perfect for RtI.

What exactly is digital about this program? In addition to the printable PDF program, the grade-level and remedial spelling worksheets are also provided as fillable PDFs; the Diagnostic Spelling Assessment is an audio file and can be automatically graded in Google Forms; and the assessment results may be uploaded to the Diagnostic Spelling Assessment Mastery Matrix in Google Sheets to individualize instruction with the remedial spelling pattern worksheets. Ideal for in-class and distance (virtual) learning.

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“I work with a large ELL population at my school and was not happy with the weekly spelling tests, etc. Through my research in best practices, I know that spelling patterns and word study are so important at this age group. However, I just couldn’t find anything out there that combines the two. We have just adopted RtI at my school and your spelling matrix is a great tool for documentation. The grade level spelling program and remediation are perfect for my students.” 

Heidi

How to Teach the Differentiated Spelling Grade-level Program

1. Students take a weekly spelling pattern pretest and self-correct. Students create personal spelling lists from the words missed on their pretest, spelling errors identified in their writing, spelling errors from their previous spelling posttests, and from the supplemental resources provided in the appendix.

2.The teacher explains the weekly spelling pattern.

3. Students complete the spelling pattern word sort and self-correct in class (printable and fillable PDF digital versions).

4. Students study their personal spelling lists.

5. Students take the posttest (once a week or bi-weekly) in pairs, alternating dictations.

Summative: After seven weeks of instruction, students take a summative assessment of the seven previous spelling patterns.

How to Teach the Differentiated Spelling Individualized (Remediation) Program

1. Students take the Diagnostic Spelling Assessment (a comprehensive spelling patterns assessment… not a random sample qualitative spelling inventory), using the audio file included in the program or the Google forms version. The teacher corrects the test (or Google forms does it for you) and records spelling pattern deficits on the progress monitoring matrix (printable and Google sheets versions).

2. Students complete targeted worksheets (printable and fillable PDF digital versions) corresponding to the spelling patterns they missed on the diagnostic assessment. Each worksheet explains the spelling pattern, provides examples, includes a spelling sort, has a word jumble, rhyme, and/or book search, and includes a short formative assessment to determine whether or not the student has mastered the spelling pattern. Students self-correct the worksheet to learn from their mistakes and mini-conference with the teacher, who corrects the formative assessment to determine mastery. If mastered, the teacher marks as such on the progress monitoring matrix.

Now that’s effective differentiated instruction! Your students can catch up, while they keep up with grade level spelling instruction.

The program is easy to teach. We even provide two quick YouTube training videos to ensure your success!

Plus, get these helpful spelling resources:

• How to Study Spelling Words
• Spelling Proofreading Strategies for Stories and Essays
• Outlaw Words
• The 450 Most Frequently Used Words
• The 100 Most Often Misspelled Words
• The 70 Most Commonly Confused Words
• Eight Great Spelling Rules, Memory Songs, and Raps (with Mp3 links)
• Spelling Review Games

Why Other Spelling Programs are Ineffective and Why Differentiated Spelling Instruction (DSI) Makes Sense

• Others use “themed” spelling word lists, grouping words by such themes as animals, months, holidays, or colors.
• DSI uses developmental spelling patterns for its word lists, providing sequential, research-based orthographic instruction.
• Others use practice worksheets that focus on rote memorization, such as word searches, fill-in the-blanks, or crossword puzzles.
• DSI provides spelling sorts/word parts worksheets to help students practice recognition and application of the spelling patterns.
• Others de-emphasize structural analysis.
• DSI emphasizes word study: syllables, accents, morphemes, inflections, spelling rules, pronunciation, and derivational influences.
• Others do not integrate vocabulary instruction.
• DSI integrates homonyms, common Greek and Latin prefixes, roots, and suffixes, and other linguistic influences.
• Others minimize the reading-spelling connection.
• DSI reinforces the decoding-encoding connection with an instructional scope and sequence aligned with systematic explicit phonics instruction. The DSI program includes five years of seamless spelling instruction (Grades 4 through 8)—perfect for grade-level classes, combination classes, and flexible homeschool instruction.
• Others ignore spelling irregularities.
• DSI includes “Exceptions” throughout the program, providing problem-solving strategies that build student (and teacher) confidence in the English orthographic spelling system.
• Others use spelling tests solely as summative assessments.
• DSI uses spelling tests as diagnostic and formative instruments to help teachers differentiate instruction. Recording matrices enable teachers to keep track of mastered and un-mastered spelling patterns for each student—simple record-keeping and minimal paperwork.
• Others provide one-size-fits-all instruction.
• DSI provides the resources for true differentiated instruction from remedial to grade-level to accelerated spellers.
• Others use visual-only spelling strategies.
• DSI uses multi-sensory instructional practice, including songs, raps, games and phonological awareness activities—perfect for students with auditory processing deficits and a “must” for effective Response to Intervention (RtI) instruction.
• Others have no writing-spelling connection.
• DSI requires students to develop weekly Personal Spelling Lists that include commonly misspelled words from their own writing.
• Others provide no review activities for unit spelling tests.
• DSI provides ample review activities, including Word Jumbles for each sound-spelling pattern, web-based songs and raps, and entertaining games.
• Others take either inordinate teacher preparation or require too much class time.
• DSI is “teacher-friendly” and requires only minimal prep time. And the flexible DSI resources will not eat up excessive instructional minutes.
• Others are overly expensive and require consumable workbooks.
• DSI requires only one worksheet each lesson, per student—truly economical.

Check out the comprehensive CCSS Grades 4−8 Spelling Scope and Sequence to see how these programs will help you coordinate seamless, Standards-based spelling instruction at your school.

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The Problem with Words Their Way

Back in the late 1990s, I served as an elementary reading specialist in a large Northern California school district. Our cadre of 21 reading specialists were in-serviced on new word study program, Words Their Way®. Dr. Shane Templeton, one of the authors, trained us for four days. Two of Dr. Templeton’s training components, the Qualitative Spelling Inventory (developed by colleague and fellow author, Dr. Donald Bear) and the developmental patterns of spelling, were novel approaches to word study. By the end of the fourth day, we reading specialists had bought in hook, line, and sinker to the Words Their Way® program. Our 50,000-student district adopted the Qualitative Spelling Inventory as our K−6 diagnostic spelling assessment, and teachers used the test results to both place students in reading programs and differentiate instruction within the classroom.

The elementary school to which I was assigned was over 1,000 students and drew from lower to middle income, ethnically and language diverse neighborhoods. Our supportive principal purchased each staff member a copy of Words Their Way®. I was allotted 10 two-hour staff developments, and we dug into teaching the program to our students.

By the end of two years, here’s what we teachers found: The Qualitative Spelling Inventory (now in three iterations: the Primary, Elementary, and Upper Elementary) was a reliable placement assessment, alongside of our phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and writing sample assessments. Certainly, spelling ability is one key indicator of reading ability as recent studies have demonstrated (Adams, 2011; Gentry & Graham, 2010; Moats, 2005; Reed, 2012). However, the assessment gave only general information as to which developmental spelling stages matched our students’ spelling mastery. Diagnostic assessments, based upon random samples, which produce only general student data are problematic for teachers in the trenches. Teachers want comprehensive diagnostic assessments which pinpoint specific deficits. In other words, teachers want teachable data. The Words Their Way inventories narrowed down the deficits, but were rather useless, according to my elementary school teachers, in terms of targeting differentiated instruction.

After the first year of training and implementation of Words Their Way® in my elementary school, only half of the teachers decided to continue the program for the next school year. By the end of the second year, only a handful continued use of the program. It just wasn’t their concerns about the utility of the spelling inventory; teachers found other problems with the program:

1. The Words Their Way® program requires inordinate amounts of teacher prep and class time to implement with fidelity.
2. The results from both standardized tests and teacher observations did not see the expected spelling improvement (nor reading and vocabulary improvement). That improvement did come two years later with the district’s adoption of the Open Court phonics program, albeit without a district-wide adoption of a spelling curriculum.
3. Teachers began to see the Words Their Way® word sorts as only one means of spelling practice and wanted to use other spelling instructional strategies. Additionally, primary teachers, especially, questioned the accuracy the development stages. Their students and their spelling-reading instruction did not perfectly conform to and match each neatly described spelling stage. Intermediate and upper grades teachers found The Derivational Relations Stage to be an unwieldy creature to teach and did not see the pay-off for investing so much prep and instructional time in the program. As usual, teachers can be quite prescient when evaluating the application of theory into practice. Twenty years later, noted spelling researcher, J. Richard Gentry, PHD, echoed their concerns in his article, “Why America Can’t Read,”

Words Their Way is a guidebook for studying words; it is not a spelling curriculum. The original preface describes it purpose:  “…Ordered in this developmental format, Words Their Way complements the use of any existing phonics, spelling, and vocabulary curricula.”

Dr. Gentry cites what he views to be the theoretical flaw in the Words Their Way® program:

In Chapter 1 of Words Their Way® (2016 edition) we learn the theoretical basis for this method of word study: “Developmental spelling researchers have examined the three layers of English orthography in relation to developmental progressions from alphabet to pattern to meaning.” (Bear, et al, 2000, p.5.) As a developmental spelling researcher, I beg to disagree. There is no developmental progression in the child’s brain when constructing word knowledge that proceeds over time from alphabet to pattern to meaning. Word knowledge of alphabet, pattern, and meaning are being constructed at every stage of spelling development (Gentry, 2000).

More importantly, spelling development does not continue to develop in phases or stages beyond a ceiling which usually happens near the end of first grade if kids are developmentally on track. I pointed this out in The Reading Teacher in a refereed journal article about sixteen years ago (Gentry, 2000).

Let me be specific. There is no developmental stage for Ages 10+ in Grades 5 to 12 called “The Derivational Relations Stage” as claimed in all editions of WTW. In fact, as spelling researcher Louisa Moats points out, Derivational Relations begins in first grade: Words in a first grade spelling curriculum are Anglo-Saxon regular consonant and vowel phone-grapheme correspondences along with words such as goat, wife, mother, love, and house. They all have an alphabet layer, an Anglo-Saxon pattern, and a meaning layer. In fact, derivational constancy is so dominant in English at early levels that the 100 most frequently used words in English—the ones teachers should teach in first grade—can all be traced back to Anglo-Saxon origins. This debunks Word’s Their Way’s “alphabet, pattern, and meaning” stage theory which suggests that clusters of error types develop later in brain development.

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So, how did these teachers continue to teach spelling without using Words Their Way®? We applied the best elements of WTW instruction: diagnosis, spelling patterns (not whole word) instructional focus, spelling sorts (albeit, not the time-consuming WTW exploratory sorts) based upon spelling patterns, differentiated instruction (individualization, if you prefer) based upon diagnostic assessment in a weekly instructional plan that was effective and efficient, yet required no prep, only minimal correction, and minimal amounts of valuable class time.

Weekly Instructional Plan

1. Weekly spelling pattern pretest of grade-level spelling patterns
2. Spelling pattern sort
3. Personalized spelling lists
4. Differentiated spelling patterns practice based upon results of diagnostic assessment
5. Paired posttests of the personalized spelling lists

Differentiated Spelling Instruction

Teachers bought into this Weekly Spelling Plan, but needed the resources that Words Their Way® did not provide. So, over the years I developed five grade-level spelling programs (4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) to help implement the Weekly Instructional Plan for grade-level, differentiated spelling instruction. I also developed a comprehensive diagnostic spelling assessment with targeted spelling pattern worksheets (each with formative assessments) to correspond to each of the 102 spelling patterns included on the comprehensive Diagnostic Spelling Assessment.* Check out my Differentiated Spelling Instruction, my Spelling Literacy Centers, or my Grammar, Mechanics, Spelling, and Vocabulary BUNDLES.

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*FREE as promised…

Fall 2020 Update: I recently created an audio version and Google forms self-correcting version of the Diagnostic Spelling Assessment to make life easier for teachers (especially for distance learning, make-ups, and for new students). The links to the paper, audio, and Google forms assessment formats, as well as recording matrices (paper and Google sheets) are available without cost in each of the product descriptions linked above. Additionally, make sure to preview the programs and print the free samples.

The Problem with Words Their Way

Interested in side by side comparisons of the Words Their Way® spelling inventories and the Diagnostic Spelling Assessment? See all kindergarten–third grade spelling pattern test item comparisons in this four-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aczs81Jhcz8

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Differentiated Spelling Instruction

For many teachers, spelling instruction has taken a back seat to other instruction, especially in the ELA middle and high school classrooms. Perhaps this has been the case because of so many years in which spelling was relegated to an editing-only issue at the tail end of the writing process. Or perhaps this has been the case because of so many years in which spelling was considered as part to whole instruction rather than in the predominant whole to part instruction of whole language reading and constructivism. Or perhaps this has been the case because of so many years in which spelling was considered as the stepchild of vocabulary. Spelling workbooks, once a staple in both the elementary and secondary classrooms, were removed from supplemental program lists at district and state levels. However, things are changing. Educators who once thought that spelling word check would solve students’ spelling and writing issues are squarely facing the fact that they do have a responsibility to teach spelling patterns.

In fact, most all teachers support teaching some form of simple to complex instructional order in teaching spelling. For example, students need to be able to spell plurals for singular nouns with an ending s prior to learning that nouns ending in /ch/, /sh/, /x/, /s/, or z are spelled with “es” prior to learning nouns ending in /f/ are spelling with “ves” prior to learning about irregular plurals such as children and deer prior to learning about Latin plural spellings such as “” and “ae.” In other words, the simple academic language and grammatical instruction should precede the more complex. We have supportive (and recent–as of January 2016) educational research to validate this instructional order:

Here’s the research to support simple to complex instructional order…

In a January 2016 article, the American Psychological Association published a helpful article titled “Practice for Knowledge Acquisition (Not Drill and Kill)” in which researchers summarize how instructional practice should be ordered: “Deliberate practice involves attention, rehearsal and repetition and leads to new knowledge or skills that can later be developed into more complex knowledge and skills… (Campitelli & Gobet, 2011).”

Of course, spelling instruction (like grammar and usage instruction) is certainly recursive. Once the simple is taught to “mastery” and the complex is introduced, the simple is always re-taught and practiced in other instructional contexts. For example, teachers will need to teach and re-teach the i before e spelling rule yearly from third grade through high school.

The Common Core Standards present a simple to complex instructional scope and sequence in the Language Strand Standards… albeit less so in the spelling Standards.

However, grade-level Language Strand Standards do not include a comprehensive spelling scope and sequence. A few examples from the L.2 Standards prove this out. Again, check out the simple to complex instructional order for the capitalization Standards.

The Conventions of Standard English (Standard 2) requires students to “Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.”

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.K.2.D  Spell simple words phonetically, drawing on knowledge of sound-letter relationships.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.1.2.D  Use conventional spelling for words with common spelling patterns and for frequently occurring irregular words.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.1.2.E  Spell untaught words phonetically, drawing on phonemic awareness and spelling conventions.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.2.2.C  Use an apostrophe to form contractions and frequently occurring possessives.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.2.2.D  Generalize learned spelling patterns when writing words (e.g., cage → badge; boy → boil).
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.3.2.E  Use conventional spelling for high-frequency and other studied words and for adding suffixes to base words (e.g., sitting, smiled, cries, happiness).
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.3.2.F  Use spelling patterns and generalizations (e.g., word families, position-based spellings, syllable patterns, ending rules, meaningful word parts) in writing words.
•  CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.4.2.D and 5.2.D  Spell grade-appropriate words correctly, consulting references as needed.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.6.2.B, etc.  Spell correctly.

So, to summarize… Both educational research and the authors of the Common Core State Standards validate a simple to more complex mechanics sequence of instruction.

How Should This Affect My Spelling Instruction?

The simple to complex instructional order is clearly conducive to spelling patterns instruction. Students need to master the basic sound-spellings and sight words before moving on to more complex spelling patterns influenced by derivational affixes and roots. 

A spelling program with a comprehensive instructional scope and sequence, aligned to the Common Core Language Standards, College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards, and/or State Standards provides a well-defined instructional order.

Site levels (and districts) need to plan a comprehensive year-to-year scope and sequence for spelling instruction. The Common Core State Standards provide bare bones exemplars or benchmarks, but educators need to fill in the blanks. Students will not improve spelling by reading and writing alone. Students need more spelling instruction than a weekly pre and post test, a personal spelling errors notebook, or simply being required to spelling content vocabulary words correctly. Spelling instruction is sequential.

A Model Grades 3-8 Spelling Scope and Sequence

Differentiated Spelling Instruction

Preview the Grades 3-8 Spelling Scope and Sequence tied to the author’s comprehensive grades 3-8 Language Strand programs. The instructional scope and sequence includes grammar, usage, mechanics, spelling, and vocabulary. Teachers and district personnel are authorized to print and share this planning tool, with proper credit and/or citation. Why reinvent the wheel? Also check out my articles on Grammar Scope and Sequence, Mechanics Scope and Sequence, and Vocabulary Scope and Sequence.

FREE DOWNLOAD TO ASSESS THE QUALITY OF PENNINGTON PUBLISHING AMERICAN ENGLISH AND CANADIAN ENGLISH SPELLING PROGRAMS. Check out these grades 3-8 programs HERE. Administer my FREE comprehensive Diagnostic Spelling Assessment with audio file and recording matrix. It has 102 words (I did say comprehensive) and covers all common spelling patterns and conventional spelling rules. It only takes 22 minutes and includes an audio file with test administration instructions. Once you see the gaps in your students’ spelling patterns, you’re going to want to fill those gaps.

Get the Diagnostic Spelling Assessment, Mastery Matrix, and Sample Lessons FREE Resource:

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