Thick Description

Making Words 2-13-13
During our weekly making words lesson, the students were getting excited trying to discover the mystery word before we even get started.  All the students find the letter cards for the letters: e,y,b,o,k, a, d, r.  I picked this particular activity because students will be making words with endings: ay and oy which we have studied in previous weeks.  We started making our two letter words and quickly went through or, ad, and do.  The class was engaged, remembering to give me the thumbs up signal when they had made the word.  Sally was always first to do this.  Then, I look over at Nate and his frustration begins.  He confuses the order of the letters in day as well as many other three letter words such as red, bed, bad, bay, Roy.  I dedicate much of my circulating time to him for support. I try to scaffold for him, carefully walking the line between helping him and doing it for him.  The more time I am spending at his side, the louder the noise level gets in my class.  With the slow pace, the students are finding other ways of entertaining themselves between words and becoming increasing unfocused in the Making Words activity.  Everytime I would call out a new word to make, Nate would look hopelessly at me, chin in hand, straight face, disconnected, until I walked over to him and helped him organize his thinking.  I would segment the sounds in the words and point to where he needed to put the letters so that all he needed to do was put the letters to the sounds I was making in the correct spot.  I noticed that his difficulty seems to be visual.  He was having trouble even looking at the word on the board and making it in front of him.  In particular, I noticed that Nate couldn't apply the ay spelling pattern we had learned several weeks prior and dealt with in word sorts one week prior (which he did really well with). 
   
Many times in this Making Words activity students were required to make words such as doe, rye, bray.  The students weren't interested in making these words because they had never heard of these words.  So Making Words needs to be correlated with the students' vocabularies.

The activity was longer than others we have done in the past.  We started to focus on homophones, a making the words bored, board, rode, road, boar, bore.  Normally, I feel the students would have been very interested in this, but since it was toward the end of the activity, they did not fully engage.

Conclusions:  For the next Making Words activity, I may partner Nate up with a higher level student so that he has more support and I can more closely monitor the rest of the class.  I hope that this will help with his frustration level as well as his motivation.  I also need to make it a point to further review some of these common spelling patterns so that Nate can apply them more effectively.  Perhaps a mat with boxes on which to lay his letter cards will help with visual orientation.  Also, I will monitor the time and length of the lesson, making longer lessons into two day lessons so that students can be fully engaged in what they are doing.