In 2015 each student in the VRP class will have a personalised spelling programme. The goals will be chosen based on teacher and student analysis of writing samples. This means that sometimes the goal will be to work on a particular spelling rule; another time it maybe unrelated ‘demon’ words; yet another time students may choose to focus on  morphemic understanding.

Starting in week 2, students will bring home a Spelling Capacity Matrix (as shown below).  A capacity matrix is a tool to describe, document and monitor learning. It allows us to clearly identify what is it we wish to learn and then learning over time. There are four levels of understanding that students will move through as they move towards their goals. These are ‘information’ (having seen the word before); ‘knowledge’ (knowing what the word means); ‘know-how’ (being able to spell the word without help); and ‘wisdom’ (using the word correctly in an independent writing task).  The class and I will discuss the kinds of evidence that students will need to look for in order to demonstrate wisdom.

Students will NOT be provided with a list of learning tasks to complete in order to move through these levels of understanding. Everybody learns differently: what works for one student actually holds another back; looking words up in dictionaries works for some but causes such stress for others that it undermines the whole goal. Students will be guided and supported in class time to find the processes that work well for them. This is part of our overall class goal of learning to be strong learners.

Some students will bring home a new capacity matrix every week while others may take a little longer before being ready.  It is not, however, necessary to have ‘wisdom’ checked off for each word before starting a new matrix – in fact, students may take weeks to gather evidence to demonstrate this. You may like to remind your students to regularly check back over their matrices to remind themselves of their target words/rules.