My daughter who is in grade three this year just passed me an outline for her school year entitled Grade Three Program Overview. Under the heading of Assessment/Evaluation, part three states " It is now the Department of Education’s policy that Word study tests will not be given."
WTF? Seriously? No more spelling tests in school? How the hell are they going to tell if the kids know anything or not? Home schooling looks better every year.
Not that spelling shouldn’t be taught, but it’s hardly the most important subject. Does “word study” include vocabulary / definitions?
I haven’t heard of “word study” before (the term “language arts” just cracks me up, too) but it doesn’t seem that stopping word study tests is the same as stopping spelling tests.
This is all I know of word study: ““Word study” is an alternative to traditional spelling instruction. It is based on learning word patterns rather than memorizing unconnected words.”
So could it be that they are going back to traditional spelling tests, bees, etc.?
Apparently they have decided good old “spelling” is what they want to keep, not get rid of.
Apparently the teachers are not allowed to give spelling tests any more. My daughter said they are given the words and they ask the person next to them to spell it and they mark each others work. I will try to get to the bottom of this later this week. Pretty soon all you will need is a babysitter course to be a teacher.
ridukulus. How wil kidz lern to spel?
Seriously, yeah, it sounds dumb. Have you had a chance to talk with your kid’s teacher? Maybe s/he tests spelling in a different way, say, by having the kids use vocab words in reading and writing assignments, but not doing the ol’ List of 20 Words? See if there’s some way in which spelling is still taught, even if the format is different from how you and I learned it.
Homeschooling* is* looking like a good option these days, I hear you. I’m not cut out for it myself (I’m laaaaaazy!) but that doesn’t stop me from supplementing school lessons with lessons at home, or taking on homeschool type projects on topics my kids are interested in but aren’t taught at school.
Just last night over dinner, my son (17) asked my daughter (5) if she knew what the thunder sounds she was hearing were made by. She didn’t, and he couldn’t explain it, so we spent some time comparing lightening and thunder to things they both knew - she, static electric shocks from petting a cat and he the electric spark you sometimes see when plugging an appliance into an outlet. He told her about rubbing a balloon on your hair to make it stand up, so of course she wanted to try it (too humid for success last night, but we’ll try again another time). At bedtime, we read a story about Zeus and his thunderbolts, and this morning before school she doodled lightening bolts while eating her breakfast.
It doesn’t have to be either or. You can send your kids to school for those lessons, and have some at home, too!
I don’t think spelling is all that important either. Or at least, learning it through testing always seemed silly to me. I have good spelling but it wasn’t from being tested–it was from reading a lot and being familiar with words. But I think a lot of people tend to confuse “spells well” with intelligence.
I think when I was in third grade we had a short spelling quiz every day.
Ditto.
Although I wouldn’t generalize the no-spelling-test thing to all teachers/schools as the OP seems to be doing. I have a 3rd-grader in a public school right now, and he has spelling tests every week.
I got so bored with spelling in the second grade that I misspelled words on purpose in a passive-aggressive way to “punish” the teacher for not annunciating clearly. “I know that ‘take’ was on our list but it sounded like she might have possibly said ‘lake’ so I’ll put that.” I could spell words like “milk” and “page” because I read a lot of books as a kid, so I didn’t quite understand the point of regurgitating these on tests.
Seventh grade spelling, however, is a different story. We had much harder words like “faux pas” and “judgment” (tricky, tricky). They were themed with things like “words that spelled with an i in the middle where it might sound like an a” or “foreign words that aren’t spelled anything like you’d think”. THOSE classes actually taught me something…things I remember to this day.
So don’t fret that your kids aren’t getting the same spelling drills that you got. IMHO, as long as those lessons resurface in middle school, you’re OK.
I agree that spelling may not be all that important of a subject today, but I think that at least for my kids, I would like for them to be fairly good at it. People may tend to confuse spells well with intelligence, but even more tend to place “does not spell well” with stupidity. I also think that in a professional setting there is no excuse for not spelling things right. All that being said today’s technology will fix your mistakes for you, and with the texting shorthand being used it’s probably not relevant anymore anyway.
These rules are generated by the Department of Education which would mean that a similar memo would have been sent home province-wide.
Bolding mine. It might have been helpful to mention that you were in Canada in your earlier posts. 
In which case, spelling won’t matter anyway because no matter what, your kid is going to be inserting all sorts of random u’s where they don’t belong.
I kid, I kid! Don’t throw a Labatts at me!
Enunciating.
Your children’s teachers aren’t the sole educators in their lives, you know. It takes less than five minutes a day to give your kids your own fucking spelling quiz. There’s a middle ground between public school and home schooling.
:: sigh ::
And then you find yourself in my job where genuinely intelligent people are crippled by the fact that they have such poor spelling and grammar, they are unable to communicate their brilliant ideas clearly to other people.
We tend to do less mundane things here after school, like building motorcycles, going trail riding and learning about nature while we are out there, playing sports, you know the other things in life that are important. My boy is in grade five and he can ride a motorcycle and fix it on his own, hell for that matter he does a lot of the minor repair work on my friends big street bikes, stuff like chain adjustments and brake adjustments. He knows how to use a mig welder, and he can shoot a pellet gun better than I can. I could sneak brag about my 11 year old all day, but my point is that I try to teach him skills that he can use in real life that he won’t learn in school. I send them to school to learn the basics, you know the three “r’s”, and I would at least expect there to be some standard that they would be expected to achieve and that this would be measured through some sort of testing.
My son is in 8th grade now, and I used to get somewhat riled that he wasn’t being taught spelling. Then I remembered that I didn’t do well on spelling tests because of any targeted spelling education, spelling came easily to me because of the amount of time I spent reading.
I make him correct spelling errors in his homework, and he rolls his eyes and sighs at me saying, “She doesn’t check for that!” I tell him that teaching is hard enough without making his teachers have to guess what word he meant.
They just had a story on this around here.
The rationale is that students have gotten very good at spelling tests, and also gotten very good at forgetting everything immediately afterward.
The replacement for spelling tests is to teach the vocabulary and evaluate the word usage in the students’ writing and speaking assignments.
And, at least in the two districts featured in the story, teachers do grade for spelling on the written assignments.
As I always mention in these threads, reading a lot does not necessarily make you a good speller. It is more likely to do so if you read poorly enough that your eyes stop once or more per word. However, as children progress past this point, they will often stop noticing spelling.