Alisha Tricarico Spelling Inventory Assessment The spelling inventory assessment is designed to elicit a students level of knowledge for

their reading and writing. The test consists of a variety of words that cover different stages. The words read to the child are ones they have not previously studied in order to create higher validity of this test. The spelling inventory test allows teachers to specify where a child is ranked in their knowledge of phonics, and allows teachers to focus on where students struggle. For this assignment I assessed a student named Garv. He is a kindergarten student at Cambridge Elementary in South Brunswick, NJ. There are 20 students in this classroom, and the layout of the room consists of 4 tables with five students seated at each table. This allows for socialization and group work, which is critical at this age. Students are constantly engaging in conversation and play throughout the day. It is a very diverse classroom both academically and culturally. This is an inclusive classroom, but since these students are at such a young age, none have been given an IEP yet. However, three students are being referred for testing and pulled out of class each morning during handwriting. I am not informed as to what these students are working on outside of the classroom, but I am aware that they are being pulled into the resource room. A case study team has assessed Garv for the past few weeks. They are trying to find a classification for him since he struggles within the general education classroom. He has a hard time focusing during whole group instruction and is falling behind the class. This test was given during the students independent reading time. I felt that giving the test during instruction would have taken away from the tests validity. Sometimes when other students are involved in instruction, the students taking the test are distracted because they want to return to the class. The methodology was a worksheet called Words Their Way Elementary

Spelling Inventory Feature Guide. This worksheet includes all of the featured words that are read to the student, along with gradations. The words start off easy and continuously get harder. The test can be given to a whole group, but I administered the test one on one. I did this so that I was able to see how the student was doing during the assessment. With that, I was able to notice when the student began to spell words wrong and after spelling three words wrong I terminated the test. After administering the test, I can assess the students level of phonics is based on how he/she spells the word. Garv is at the letter name middle stage. He scored a 7/7 for the emergent late and early stage; he has a strength in beginning and final consonants and he was capable of spelling words with short vowels, with the exception of the word lump. He substituted the u for an a. As for digraphs, he was able to decipher the sh sound but not the wh sound. He omitted the h in the wh. His test was terminated, due to multiple errors, before he was able to spell another word with digraphs so I am unsure of how valid this is. As for blends and long vowels, Garv struggles. For the word lump he spelt it as lap. For the mp blend he did not hear the m. For the world float he wrote fot he did not hear the l and for the long vowels he only heard the o. For train he wrote chain. With this word I feel he may have heard the ch and wrote it correctly. This is because my accent makes people sometimes mistake my tr for ch. My last name is Tricarico and people are always thinking that it starts with a c. Conducting a Spelling Inventory assessment helps inform instruction for teachers, because they become aware of students strengths and weaknesses. Teachers will know what to focus on during instruction and can avoid reiteration of areas where students are performing well. Additionally, they want to move students forward, not keep them in place. This can also help in the grouping process, because students can be grouped accordingly.