Hi, and welcome back to the Smarter Literacy Podcast from Ascend Smarter Intervention, where we simplify effective literacy instruction so every student gets what they need and every educator gets to breathe a little easier.
I'm Lindsey. And I'm Corey. And today we're gonna talk about something that comes up with educators we work with all the time.
Specifically, we're gonna talk about writing and even more specifically, we're gonna talk about spelling and sentences.
Now, so often as educators, we teach all the things related to writing, right? So we teach spelling lists. We teach the grammar rules. You know, all the things that we were told to teach to support writing.
But that's not exactly the same thing as teaching students how to think through a sentence.
What we need to start asking ourselves is, are we teaching tasks or are we building independent writers? And, you know, I think it is so easy to think that once a student has learned a pattern and the rules associated with that, they will then take that and apply it to their own independent rating outside of our sessions. And I think that's just automatically where all of our brains go because it's like, well, know it now, right? So they're gonna be using it. And oftentimes, that is not what happens.
Yes. I know that when I first started supporting literacy, I felt like I was doing everything right. So it's like you said, I was teaching the patterns. I had rules that I was teaching from a phonics perspective.
So I was like, great. I took the rule and we practiced it and we would do spelling word lists and we would do sentence dictation. So I would tell them a sentence and then ask them to write it down and it had the pattern in it. They were doing it.
We edited our sentence to make sure we have our capitals and it looks good and it followed what I said. It has its punctuation. And honestly, the next week, it was totally gone.
That pattern that I had taught, they weren't retaining it at all.
I was like, what is happening? Right. Yes. I think actually what you did at the beginning of your literacy teaching was even more than what I was doing.
I was like, great. I was that teacher. I was like, I taught them the pattern. They did a whole bunch of, you know, spelling words with that pattern.
They got it. And it's like, no, we didn't even use it in a sentence. Oh, gosh. Like, looking back now, I'm like, so much missed opportunity.
I think we all do that. I feel like I go back to my early teaching days and I'm like, oh my gosh. But, no, it really wasn't it really wasn't that bad. Right?
But but I think, you know, the thing is is that it really starts to feel like a little bit of a a checklist. Right? Okay. I taught that pattern.
Great. Check. It's done.
And what I realized much, much later, unfortunately, was that it's actually not about teaching every spelling pattern or every grammar rule. It's about teaching students actually how to think through a sentence independently. And so one of the things that we started doing was even having students generate their own sentences. So instead of just doing dictation, which is what my first rodeo with literacy instruction, it only included dictation, which is good.
You wanna make sure that they're applying their spelling patterns and that kind of thing at the sentence level. But what I really started to notice was, wow, they can copy my sentence perfectly. But then when they go to make their own, what is this? What is this?
They're not including all the pieces that we need to have an actual sentence. And that was even often after you had taught a number of grammar rules and that kind of thing too. I'm like, how do we not know what we need to make an actual full sentence?
Oh, absolutely. And, you know, kind of thinking back to even like when I was going through school and learning how to become a literacy teacher, I just feel like this part was never really talked about with learning how to teach literacy. At least it wasn't for me because again, I was very like, okay, so learn the pattern, practice it, learn it. But then like you said, when we see the kids actually writing their own sentences, we're realizing, oh, there's so many gaps there.
And it's like, oh, I thought you knew this. And it's like, oh, oh no, we didn't. And maybe even it goes back to how we were taught ourselves. I just remember throughout my life in school, so many spelling tests and just memorization tests and quizzes.
Even like those grammar rules was usually a quiz. Here's this, here's this. So I just memorized it for the test or for whatever that lesson was. And then like, how did I learn how to use an application when I wasn't really being taught that?
And so I think a lot of educators go, well, this is how I was taught and I do it correctly so the students will get it correctly. And it's just that assumption that we have kind of underlying in our lessons.
Absolutely. And you make a great point, I think, about thinking back to when I was in fourth grade. And I'm sure it was in many grades, but I think very specifically back to fourth grade because our teacher did leveled spelling tests. And so you wanted to be in the highest level. And you knew who was in the highest level. And you knew who was not in the highest level.
And I don't think there was any pattern or anything. So it wasn't even here's a phonics pattern. It was just here are the words that you're expected to know. And I think there are still a number of curricula that actually just have sometimes it's like the vocabulary words.
The vocabulary words become the spelling words. And I think that alone very much is going to lead into that memorization that you're talking about because that's what I did. I was like, okay, I would have my list of twenty words or however long the spelling list was. I feel like it was a lot.
I feel like it was something around twenty. Yeah. And you would just memorize them. Just pack it in, memorize it, and then take the test on Friday, dump those words, bring in the next weeks.
Yep. And I think for some of us, if we had strong visual memory, that was enough. Like you said, like, okay, great. I've locked that one in.
I think there's lot of students where that's not necessarily the case and they don't have that visual memory. And so I think it's so important to think about that too. And even to think about, hey, maybe this is working for some of my students, but it's not necessarily working for all of them because I think you make a really good point about, hey, just because that worked for me when I was growing up doesn't necessarily mean that it's effective for students. And so anyway, I think that's such a great point.
And I think also the thing is that when we even if we are teaching in a way where we're focusing on the rules, okay, here's the rule or here's the grammar list or here's the word list, we assign the worksheet and then we move on. And we've like you said, check done.
But if we don't teach really how to construct a sentence from an idea and how to edit it independently, what to do when we get stuck on a word, then they know all of the individual tasks, but they don't actually know how to put all of that together. And you're kinda like, oh, I thought that just came. It doesn't. Yeah. It doesn't.
Yes. And I I think we used this analogy on our last podcast episode, but we've we've given them a puzzle piece. But great. Now what do I do with this this puzzle piece?
Like, yeah. I gotta connect it all the way, and their their brains are not there. They're not saying, oh, this connects to another piece. They're just like, I'm just holding this piece, and I don't know what to do with it.
Until Friday. And then I throw it out. Yes. And then you're like, okay. Here's the next piece.
And then before long, you're like, wait. Where's all the puzzle pieces? Like, why isn't it put together? And they're like, wait.
What?
I was supposed to hold on to You didn't give me that instruction.
I thought I thought I just had to hold on to it until the end of the week, and then I was gonna throw it away or something. You're like, no. Yeah.
Alright. So all jokes aside, what what do we do then? Right? What does it look like?
And I wanna be clear. We absolutely do need to be teaching patterns. And so if you're already thinking, yeah, I am teaching patterned spelling list as part of my writing instruction, that's beautiful. That's fantastic.
And we also want to make sure that students are starting to build independence for real writing because I think that's the other thing. I sort of felt like, oh, I'm teaching the patterns and so I'm creating this connection that they can then use.
But still, no. It's still just a checklist. It's still just a, Okay, I practiced OI spelling words. Great.
Well, why do we focus on spelling words? Two reasons. One, it's going to help to support decoding. So the opposite process of decoding or sounding words out to read is encoding, which is spelling, where we're making sure that we can use words in our writing.
But that's not the end goal. The end goal is not that we can pass a spelling test or that we can get one hundred percent on all of our spelling words so that we can spell those words correctly in our writing. And so we have to come back to, all right, let's actually focus on what it looks like to write a good sentence. So one of the things that we do is we always start with who or what, did what.
Or I had a teacher tell me, they don't always have a did what. No. It could also be an is what. Right?
It could be a number of things. But an action. Right? A who or what did what.
And I just say who or what did what because it's short and it's easy to remember. Right. But you might have a number of different predicates going on there. And then you'll get a when, where, why, or how.
So good sentences also often give you a little bit more than just who or what did does is what. They'll also give you that bonus that gives you that good visualization.
And then after we have who or what, did what, when, where, why, or how, then we can get into editing. Do we have capitals? Does it look right? Does it sound right?
Does it have a punctuation? Are there any words I'm not sure about spelling? And that's the biggest critical shift is you actually want students to be thinking about, are there any words I'm not sure about? Because, one, that requires executive functioning.
They have to have the what we call, metacognitive awareness or the awareness that, oh, I'm looking at this word. Doesn't quite look right or I don't feel confident in that particular word. And then we can use our spelling strategy to help support, okay, great. Let me think about if I don't know a word, let me move on to kind of what we'll call this spelling decision routine.
I'm putting that in air quotes because we don't call it that with our students. But that's just what I'm calling it, the spelling decision routine.
And within that spelling decision routine, once you've found a word that you're not sure about, you want to think about, alright, well, many syllables do I hear? How many sounds do I hear within each syllable? Now let me think about matching those phonics patterns that I've been learning to each of those individual sounds. And then you can check it and think, okay, does that look better? Does that look right? Does that feel right? And I think the thing is we're not aiming for perfect sentences, but we are aiming for students to be able to construct their own sentence including the subject predicate or the who or what did, does, is what when they're writing themselves.
Yes, absolutely.
And I just have to say I really do love these routines because they really do make a huge impact with my students. So at first, whenever I start these routines with my students, they're a little like, I don't get it. Not just the how, but the why. Like, why are we doing this?
But once we really start getting into it, making it a routine, making it something that we practice every single time, they really get into it. And the next thing I know, they're just kind of doing it on their own. And they are building stronger sentences. They are recognizing those spelling words where it's like, Oh yeah, I'm not sure if I spelled that one right.
Let me come back to that in a minute.
And it's so powerful to see my kids go from passive learners where I'm like, okay, spell this word for me to, you know what? Let's write out a sentence and let's work through it together. You're gonna be the captain of the ship here. And then we're gonna go through it piece by piece and practice the editing section of our writing. And my kids are just getting stronger and stronger and stronger the more we do this and the more we practice. And I can see them be more confident as well.
Absolutely. I love how you said letting them be the captain of their own ship. And I think that's really what we're trying to do, right? We want to give them more ownership, more agency in their own writing.
And it does a lot of things. So, one of the things that that does is it creates more motivation and buy in because they're writing something that they actually care about. When I was doing sentence dictation, you know, lot of times it was the silliest sentences, right? And of course, you do that on purpose because you want to make sure, especially if you are teaching phonics based spelling words, you're trying to get as many of them as you can into these sentences.
So it's like Jack and Jill went up the hill. You're trying to get all these patterns that are matching. But when you actually take a step back to what are we actually trying to accomplish here, we want to make sure that you're able to recognize patterns in your writing and in your spelling. And so I think one of the things that we really need to think about as we give them more of that agency and more of that autonomy is how are we helping students build independence in their writing.
And this starts to shift us away from, okay, we just completed the task, which is like we talked about last time. It's like check, check, check, which, again, I love a good checklist. Right? I am here for a good checklist.
I will say that again and again. But we don't want writing to feel like a checklist. We want it to feel like, hey. This is a way in which I express my ideas, my thoughts.
But when we can do it in this more structured way, we can also give a framework to students who maybe are struggling. Maybe they're English language learners. They're not quite sure how to construct a sentence. Or it's a good way to edit.
Again, do we have a who or a what? Do we have a did what? And it allows them to become more independent problem solvers as well. They can start to see how spelling and grammar apply to their own ideas, right?
And the process seems to have just so much more of a purpose than just, okay, we're doing this because this is part of our lesson. It's like we've said in previous podcasts too, they just they're not connecting the pieces. And so here we can start to say, all right, we're looking at editing or we're looking at spelling or we're looking at all of this from a framework of you have something that you want to say or something that you want to share.
And when I think back to my education, to your point earlier, I don't remember all the grammar rules Right. That I was ever taught. Right? But as an adult, I do know that I need to write sentences that express something that I have to say, and I need to make sure that my sentence has the correct parts of a sentence and that I'm editing it.
Yeah. I'm not stuck in the minutiae, though. I'm not stuck in, oh, do I have, you know, a jerund? Do I have, you know, all these different things?
I don't I'm not worried about labeling it all. I'm just worried about does it have what it needs to be an effective sentence? And I think that's the true goal. Yeah.
So we always have to bring ourselves back to that whenever we're teaching grammar or spelling or whatever it is. What is the actual end goal? What is the functional goal of what I'm trying to do here?
Yes. And just to even kind of add on to that, I think of my students before I've taught this process to them, and let's say they've written like a run on sentence or it's a very unstructured sentence. And I ask them to read it aloud and I'm like, So does that sound right to you? Pretty much ninety five percent of the time, maybe even more than that, they'll say, Yeah, sounds good.
It's like, No. It's not. But they haven't recognized what a good sentence sounds like. So then when you start practicing those routines of who did what, and if there is when, where, why, which most good sentence like you said, do, then it's like, oh, okay, I can structure it that way.
Here's my who, did what, how. That's what you need. Period. Okay, great. Anything else is going to be more of a run on.
And that's where we can just start getting them to even like that visual mapping of these sentences of being like, oh, I see what was wrong with my writing before and I see now what makes a good, stronger sentence than the one I had before.
Yeah, that yes, exactly. And I think to you know, one of the things that we like to do is we like to use color coding to make that even more visual to your point of, hey, if we're gonna make a sentence, let's start with that who or what and we're gonna make it red. And in fact, you can write this on a whiteboard or something like that. And one of the things that I like to do when I'm teaching, for example, a specific phonics pattern, if I'm using phonics patterns to run my lesson and I want to make sure that they're actually using these, I might say, great. Let's brainstorm a number of who or what's a noun basically. Let's think of some nouns that actually follow this pattern.
And then it's like, okay, great. Now I've got them creating their own sentence, right? What's going to be the sentence by brainstorming. Then we can go into, all right, great.
Now we're going to brainstorm a did what, does what, is what. So we can think about a verb basically. And let's think about verbs that follow this pattern, and we can do that in blue. Right.
That's always gonna be blue. And then we can say, great. Now let's think about some adjectives or some adverbs. Let's think about some describing words.
We're gonna put those in green. Okay. Awesome. Now we have potentially a who or what, did what, when, where, why, or how.
It's all color coded. And then they know, great. I have all the pieces that I need to make an effective sentence. Let's put that together.
And it's visual to your point. And so it makes it so much more clear.
That's when they're just constructing their own sentence. But again, if they're editing a sentence, they can highlight the other way. Highlight your who or what in red. Highlight your did, does, is what in blue.
Highlight any of that extra information in green. And it doesn't have to be perfect, but it does help them to see, oh, I didn't have a did what. Or like you said, it's a run on. It's like, well, I still had a lot more.
And it's like, okay, so you had another red and another blue and another green and then another red and blue. Okay, we probably need a period We don't have a period anywhere.
And going back to how this is a reciprocal process with the reading, because I'm doing sentence decoding and I'm even having them mark there the who did what and then the adverbial phrase, if there is one. What's really fun is, Okay, let's get a sentence that doesn't have an adverbial phrase and let's have them add on an adverbial phrase so they can already kind of take that pre structured sentence and we can scaffold a little bit like, Okay, so we have the who did what. Can we add anything else to make this sentence even stronger or more interesting? And that can kind of get them thinking, Oh, yeah, Jane went to the park on a sunny day just or in the middle of August or with her friends just to give a little bit more details.
So now it's all of a sudden this character has gone to the park, but now we know she's with multiple people. And so when they go to their own writing later on and they're thinking about, can I make this sentence stronger? Can I make my writing stronger? That's something they can do.
I have a who did what. Can I add that a reveal phrase in? Or maybe I even start with an adverbial phrase because some of our sentences do start that way. So it doesn't always have to be who did what, when, where, why, how it can be the when, who did what, you know?
It just gets them to play around with language more in a way that isn't as accessible to them when we're just asking them to memorize.
Absolutely. I think that is such a great point. And when you start to play around with the sentence a little bit, then you can start to add in some of your grammar rules too. Then you can start to see, oh, because I put the adverbial phrase first, I put the green in front of the red or in front of the sentence, I'm gonna add a comma at the end of that.
And then they can start to see, oh, I get it because it moved. Right? And so, again, I think just to keep it actionable at the bare minimum, just use that phrasing, right? When we think about editing, especially at the sentence level and thinking about spelling, really it all comes down to that really simple routine.
So try it out. So try having your students identify who or what and highlight that or underline it in red. Then did, does, is what in blue, and then any of that adverbial or any extra in green.
And then you can even take it further. So sometimes what I'll even do for, especially my more advanced student, is then I will have them highlight any of those conjunctions in yellow. Right? So, okay, great.
Let's find those conjunctions because a lot of my students have a lot of and, so, for, but, like, just keeps going on and on and on. And I'm like, no. No. No.
We don't wanna have more. Basically, I tell them, you may not have more than two. For me, you may not have more than two just because most of my students are massive run on run ons. Yeah.
But so you can have them do that. And then I have them highlight or underline their punctuation in orange so that they can start to see each of those different pieces of the sentence. And so honestly, would just say have colored pencils or have a set of markers. Just have those there so that when they're editing, it's not just to your point, does it look right?
Does it sound right? Because every time I ask that question, they're like, yes.
And I'm like, okay, cool. So let's check all of our parts. Right. And and that's what we're doing.
So as we're doing our sentence editing process of we use the acronym CAMPS just because we're from Colorado. We like hiking. And so we were just using CAMPS, but we can have them check. Do I have a capital?
Does it look good for the appearance? For meaning, though, that's where I'm saying, okay, when we get to meaning, you better have these pieces highlighted and it better have each of its parts there Because otherwise they do the same thing. Yep. Yep.
That makes sense. That that's perfect. We're good. We're good. Then you've got your punctuation. Okay.
Great. That's highlighted. And then you're underlining those words you're not sure about.
And at the end of the day, I would rather my students be able to identify a word that they don't know for spelling Yeah.
Than to be like, yeah, it looks great. No.
I wanna see if you can find any words that we should talk about.
Yeah.
And that's a good thing.
That's actually a sign of competence Yes. Of being able to look at something and be like, that doesn't look exactly right. I'm not sure what's wrong with it, but it looks like we could use some help. And then we can say, great.
Let's think about it. How many syllables? How many sounds? Which letters would potentially match onto each of those different sounds?
And sometimes you'll get rule breakers, right, which is fine. But you can just say, oh, you know what's interesting? Yeah. You got the right number of syllables.
You got the right number of sounds. But in this particular word, that spelling pattern does something that we didn't expect it to do. Yep. So I'm just gonna tell you what it is and eventually you'll have a visual memory for it and that'll be okay.
But that's it.
So that's that's the process.
And I think it's such a great process, too. And I know so many educators are starting to become worried about their students and their writing specifically because of the introduction of AI. I know this is mainly coming from teachers of older students who are using a lot of AI to do writing. But if we slow down the process and we ask kids to actually dissect those sentences, edit those sentences, get them, like you said, thinking about what am I writing? Does it sound right? We can kind of combat that passiveness where we're actually asking kids to do the work and to make sure that they're understanding why we're doing this work.
Absolutely. And I think too, you know, one of the things that can be really beautiful is that then you can, if we're getting into doing the work, to your point, especially if you have groups of students, you can have them switch up their writing and have the partners try to find who or what did what, when, where, why, or how. And just say, look, when you're writing for somebody, you're writing so that somebody else can read and understand. And that's just it's a process. Yeah. And it's partially a creative process, and it's partially a technical process.
And, yeah, I think we can definitely chat a little bit more about AI in our next episode because we are gonna be talking about longer form writing. And you're absolutely right. I think it's something that we have to be so aware of, and it's something we are seeing a lot of here as well.
Anyway, that being said, if you want to see more about what this process looks like that we talked about, we walk through it step by step inside our Spotlight PD that's called sentences and spelling routines, building independent writers. So definitely check that out because I think it makes a massive difference just to have a simple step by step process that you can use, students can follow, and it will really change the way that you look at your writing instruction, I think. You can absolutely layer it into whatever spelling lists you're already using, whatever grammar rules you're already teaching. It's not meant to take the place of something you're already doing, but it's definitely something you can layer right on top of it.
Right. And in our next episode, like you mentioned, Corey, we will be sharing more about what these routines look like for paragraphs and longer form writing.
Can't wait to chat more about that.
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