Writing Samples

Sample #1
After reading this sample I would say this child is at stage 4 of spelling development. Some things seen during this stage is that students start to apply affixes and inflectional endings to words, they also start to use compound words. Throughout this sample the student used many different inflectional endings correctly, but seemed to have trouble when it came to a more advanced skill, conjunctions . For example, two times in the sample the student meant to write "didn't" but instead wrote "diding" the first time and "didint" the second. The fact that this student was able to correctly use inflectional endings but not conjunctions shows that she is right at level 4. The only other spelling mistake was that the student wrote "washing" but meant to say "watching". This is a skill that is developed in level 3 but since there was only one mistake of this kind I do not feel as if it should bring the student down a level.

Sample #2
This sample was more difficult for me to tell what spelling stage the student is in. There were only two spelling mistakes throughout the sample. The first was the student wrote "steped" for "stepped" and the second was the student wrote "esppicaly" for "especially". Since the student did not have any trouble with affixes, inflectional endings, or compound words, which are all strategies present in level 4, I would want to say the child was past this level but I do not see much evidence of the child being in level 5. The writing sample is mostly comprised of easy words that the student had no trouble spelling, because there are no higher level words in the story, I can not tell if the student would have been able to correctly spell them or not. The closest evidence to level 5 would be how the child spelled "especially" because of the fact that one of the stages children become familiar with in level 5 is consonant alterations. I the child would have sounded the word out they could have noticed the root word of "special" which would have lead them to be able to correctly spell the word. Because the child was not able to pick out this word I would guess that she has not yet reached level 5 and therefore is still at level 4 of spelling development