Making Words 3-7-13

This week in our making words activity, I chose one that had a few plural words as we were dealing with those endings.  The students are getting much more efficient with the routines of this activity.  Again, they responded with a cheer when I informed them that they could use partners for this activity, though it cracks me up because they don't confer with a partner at all.  Nate had a few hiccups with some of the words, especially the ones with blends at the beginning such as class, stale, and scale.  Those have always been hard for him to segment.  One more thing about Nate worth noting is that he was constantly giving me words that he thought we could make, but most of the words contained letters that we did not have to work with.  What does that say about his knowledge of letters and the sounds they make to construct words?  Or was he just excited and saying things before thinking?  Becca was on target during this activity, she was busy making sure her partner had everything right as well.  Not only were the kids very successful at making the words, they are also getting really good at finding the patterns and commonalities within the words that we make.  Jack stated that sale, stale, scale, scales all followed the vowel, consonant, e pattern.  Connor said that eat, seat, least, all followed ea spelling pattern for the long e sound.  Eric pointed out that eats, scales, and castles were plural.  I had to correct about eats and then we got into that discussion, but what a good teaching point!  I really feel good about their progress.