Green Pen Words

Purpose: To help teachers pinpoint spelling words in students’ writing.

1. Keep a green pen on you at all times, with the goal of using it to help writers, not punish them.
2. If you spot a developmentally appropriate, high-frequency word misspelled in a student’s piece of writing, write it correctly in green at the bottom of the page. Look for words in journals, response logs, writing workshop pieces, etc.   I manage this by collecting just two of my students’ writer’s notebooks daily and searching for misspelled words.
3. Have students place words on their individualized spelling lists – green means “go add this one.” I prefer to add these words myself to the spelling assessment sheet I keep for each child in my assessment notebook. With this sheet I am able to find patterns in a child’s misspellings, and it gives me valuable information when I am doing report cards or sharing spelling progress with parents. These sheets are then added to students’ portfolios at the end of each grading period.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Spelling Strategies, Spelling Workshop, Word Study. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.