Henderson Reflection 18-20

I chose to reflect this time on ch. 18, Spell to Communicate. This chapter really stood out to me. As in my previous post I talked about spelling tests. On Thursdays, I have been giving the spelling pre-test. After the test I would go through and correct them all. A couple times that I have given the test, only 3 or 4 students were getting the word correct. It really bummed me out. When I would look at the other tests, I just felt so bad. I really thing the students have a very hard time understanding the words I say because of my accent. I would look at the words they misspelled and say them to myself and they were spelled exactly the way I would say them. For a while I was starting to think that maybe I needed to take a class on pronounciation. But my mentor being encouraging, told me that my words were fine. She said that even if they had a hard time understanding the word by itself, the sentence I gave should have made it clear. I still feel bad. The spelling tests are a link I think to what kind of writers the students are. The ones that never try on the test are the ones that have no creativity to their writing. There are some students who come up to me that are very good spellers and ask to spell some pretty hard words. This makes their writing more enjoyable to read. Too often I have to ask the not so good spellers what certain words are. Usually they are very easy words they should be able to spell on their own but can't.