Word Study
"Word Study" approach to spelling and mastering high frequency words.
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Word Study

This last year it came up in our staff development time how we would address that our test scores went down. Part of the reason is that the year before, we’d made this huge, huge gain, because the year before that we were a new school.  So we'd made this huge growth, and then we went down just a little bit.  So as a staff, we decided to create a lunch book club, strictly volunteer, and we read Lucy Calkin’s book, and a chapter in Guiding Reading and Writers, grades 3-6 (Chapter 17 in there is all on testing and test prep.)  We brainstormed together, how can we address the test without teaching to the test?  That’s when we came up with the word study format that we do with the white boards, after observing, “Okay, on the test there might be question addressing this particular thing, so we’d spend five minutes” each day working on high-frequency words.