What evil troll came up with WORD STUDY as a way to learn spelling words?

[Anonymous]

Who decided the best way to learn spelling words is to do monotonous and annoying tasks every single weekday night? Perhaps the developer of WORD STUDY had decent ideas and some teachers misinterpreted and came up with these awful activities thinking they were just following orders. Here's an idea. Why not have the kids memorize the words in whatever works best for their individual learning style.

Stop.The.Insanity.

[Anonymous]

That's annoying! DD (first grade) had a spelling test today. We practice in the car. That seems to be going ok so far.

[Anonymous]

Which is why I'm absolutely in love with DD's K teacher who told us last night that she will not send word study home this year!

[Anonymous]

Can you explain what it is?

[Anonymous]

Word Study is a bunch of tedious tasks to learn how to spell them. You do at least 1 task a day and you sometimes are told what you have to do and other times you chose from a list of tedious activities that wouldn't be so awful if you just had 1 assignment instead of every dam day. Here are some examples:

Cut out letters from a magazine and glue them together to form the spelling words.

Write out all the spelling words in alphabetical order

Come up with a sentence for every spelling word or write a story that incorporates them all.

Cut out the spelling words, sort them into categories, glue them to a paper and write a few sentences explaining why you chose those categories.

Create a crossword puzzle or word search with all the spelling words.

Make up a song with the spelling words and write out that song.

[Anonymous]

Ooh yes, DS had to do this last year.

It was unutterably tedious until we hit on the expedient of choosing the fastest task every time, which was to copy all the words in all the colors of the rainbow. Stupid, but quick.

Previously, we had dutifully gone in order, and the cutting and pasting had motor-challenged kid in tears (plus it took all afternoon).

[Anonymous]

Our word involved grouping words, writing sentences, and timed grouping. My kid enjoyed it, and I felt it taught more than just spelling: sorting, writing, handwriting, grouping.

I understand how the cutting and pasting activities may frustrate some motor challenged kids, an d in those cases, you put it away. For other kids, it is excellent fine motor skill practice.
.
It is meant to be more holistic than just memorizing

[Anonymous]

Totally agree. Ours had it all the way through elementary school and figured out how to pick and choose the quickest and easiest tasks to get it over with and has never been strong in spelling. She's in college now and still terrible at spelling. Word Study may be a creative way of learning for some but it doesn't necessarily teach strong spelling.

[Anonymous]

Sounds "multi-sensory".

[Anonymous]

Ours didn't have tasks to choose from, specific things were assigned, like the cutting/pasting (my kids loved that). Usually writing sentences too. But that isn't new. I remember lots of time spent writing sentences for my spelling/vocabulary words in both ES and MS.

[Anonymous]

Goes nicely with the reading logs.

[Anonymous]

I never made my son do those tasks. I just sat with him and practiced sounding out the words until he learned them. We did a "pretest" when the list of words came home and then I'd practice the ones he missed until he learned them. As soon as he got the word right three times in a row, I crossed it off the list. He actually enjoyed this and did really good in spelling.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I never made my son do those tasks. I just sat with him and practiced sounding out the words until he learned them. We did a "pretest" when the list of words came home and then I'd practice the ones he missed until he learned them. As soon as he got the word right three times in a row, I crossed it off the list. He actually enjoyed this and did really good in spelling.

Forgot to say that he never turned in any word work homework last year, but he got nearly perfect scores on all of his spelling tests, so I never heard any complaints from his teacher about not turning in homework.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Word Study is a bunch of tedious tasks to learn how to spell them. You do at least 1 task a day and you sometimes are told what you have to do and other times you chose from a list of tedious activities that wouldn't be so awful if you just had 1 assignment instead of every dam day. Here are some examples:

Cut out letters from a magazine and glue them together to form the spelling words.

Write out all the spelling words in alphabetical order

Come up with a sentence for every spelling word or write a story that incorporates them all.

Cut out the spelling words, sort them into categories, glue them to a paper and write a few sentences explaining why you chose those categories.

Create a crossword puzzle or word search with all the spelling words.

Make up a song with the spelling words and write out that song.

None of that is word study! That's a teacher who has no idea what word study is calling a bunch of pointless activities word study. I took a whole graduate class on word study, and I love it. It's really a great way to teach phonics, and desperately needed. Unfortunately, a few years back, as it became more popular and instructional coaches and principals started insisting teachers use it instead of traditional spelling, people started calling any old thing word study. Most teachers had no understanding of the actual methods that were originally considered word study, but they were told they had to do it, so it morphed into this thing where they just call anything "word study." The only one of the above that might actually be word study is the sorting exercise, but only if the words are chosen correctly and the students understand the sorting process (and the teacher really looks at the result), which is probably not what's happening. Last year my child's teacher had them memorizing sight words and was calling that word study. These teachers are either poorly trained or just lazy.

[Anonymous]

At our children's school word study is the actual study of the way word sounds are made and put together. They would take a bunch of words with the same letter groupings and sort them by the different sounds. Or vice versa (like the long "a" sound week, they might study words that have "eigh" "ay" and "a-e"). There were no games without purpose. I'm sorry they have your child doing all that!