I {heart} using notebooks in my classroom!
How many times do you hear "How do you spell ____?" at the beginning of the year. To encourage my students to phonetically spell, we do weekly spelling practice in our reading and writing notebooks. I give them two words a week to stretch out and spell on their own. One word is always a cvc word. We talk about how 5 and 6 year olds spell words differently because they hear different sounds. When they ask me "Is this how you spell ____?" I tell them "That is exactly how a 5 year old would spell that word." After we do this for a few weeks I no longer hear "How do you spell ___?" throughout my room during writing workshop. I also use these weekly spelling practice pages as assessments for things to work on during reading or writing workshop.
Later in the year we do other activities like write it and draw it.
Inspiration for "that is exactly how a 5 or 6 year old would spell that" and other writing workshop ideas...
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