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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=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.[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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