4th Grade Writing Samples

I had the students in my literature circle write a summary of the story we read the previous day which was a myth about a goldfish who fell in love with the moon…

Writing Sample #1-
This student wrote a very thorough and precise summary about the story and I believe she is in stage four of spelling development. She used commas in appropriate places throughout her writing and even incorporated big words such as “foreign” and “familiar”. The reason I placed this particular student in stage four, is because she used affixes, inflections such as “stopped”, “asked”, “going”, “looked”, and “smiling”, and compound words such as “goldfish”. One thing I noticed about this student’s summary, is that she took many phrases straight from the story so much of it isn’t in her own words. This makes it hard to determine if the student is really in stage four or not.

Writing Sample #2-
This student wrote a less thorough summary and I noticed that this resulted in missing pieces of the story that were pretty important, but I believe he is in stage three of spelling development. He left out punctuation at the end of his paragraphs which was interesting to me, because he incorporated them in the middle of them. He also misspelled many words such as “depthes” instead of “depths”, “diffrent” instead of “different”, “chating” instead of “chatting”, “beleveing” instead of “believing”, “dolfin” instead of “dolphin”, and “enuther” instead of “another”. Many of these spelling errors are because he forgot to add “silent” letters or follow spelling patterns which is a characteristic of stage three. I thought it was interesting that he obviously misspelled words by sounding them out or forgetting to get rid of the “e” before adding an inflection to the end of the word. Another interesting thing I noticed in this student’s writing is that he wrote the sentence “a dolfin came, alon came along and said mean things about the fish.” Not only did the student misspell dolphin, but he also started to write the phrase “came along” but stopped and then accidently wrote it again.