I chose the Primary Spelling Inventory (PSI) to use with my student.

I used this
inventory because it is recommended for kindergarten through early third grade because
it assesses features found from the emergent stage through the within word pattern stage
(p.27). This description fit what I thought would best assess my student. The book
recommended just calling out the first 5 words for kindergarten, or the first 15 for an
early first grade classroom. Because we are at the end of kindergarten, I was comfortable
giving the whole test to my student. I was monitoring it as we were doing it, and would
have stopped if she had more trouble than she did.

My students spelling stage is middle within word patterns. My student knows

initial and final consonant sounds as she scored 100% on those areas. She also did very
well with short vowels and digraphs, scoring 6 out of 7 on both of those tests. Where my
student uses but confuses is the common long vowels and other vowels. She attempted to
find the right vowel pair but they were often times confused. For example, she in the
word wait, she used wate as she was thinking to make the as long sound, she needed
silent e. She again confused this same pattern with the word shine. Instead of spelling it
shine, she spelled it shian, hoping when two vowels go walking, the first one does the
talking.

We will start with common long vowel patterns. I will start here because my
student missed 4 out of the 7 vowel sounds. She also missed 5 out of the 7 other vowel
sounds. This is a good starting point because my student has mostly mastered her blends
and digraphs, and is not ready for inflected endings. We will work on within word pattern
sorts number 24 and then move onto list 48 and 49.

To teach common long vowel patterns, I will use two activities to start. This first
one will be a word sort. The first word sort we will use words from number 24. The
short/long a should be a review and refresher on this pattern. We will eventually move
into the CVCe sorts across vowels and the CVVC across vowels. These all appear on
page 356-357. Words included in list 24 are cap, last, plan, sat, flat, tax, lake, wave, late,
tape, bake, fail, pail, sail, ect. Words on the list 48 are cave, drive, drove, huge, quote,
mule, ect. Words from list 49 are road, team, rain, roast, peach, ect. The second activity
that we will do will be an extension activity that uses the words from the previous sort.
We will use the open sort method for the second activity. This activity is described on
page 214-215. This sort starts with everyone sorting his or her own set of words.