3rd Grade Spellings

My DD is in 3rd grade and she only has a spelling test about every three weeks or so. I touched on this with her teacher in november at our parent / teacher conference and she said that they are not concentrating on spelling this year - its more about comprehension. This worried me then and it bothers me now. I hate reading paragraphs that my daughter is writing and there are sometimes so many spelling mistakes. I feel like her spelling is regressing from last year when she had spelling tests weekly.

Does anyone else experience this in their schools?

Thanks!

Re: 3rd Grade Spellings

Yes my DDs grades 4 and 6 never had spelling tests. Only vocab tests. Both are pretty good spellers. We are in a NYC school.

3rd Grade Spellings

My DS is in 4th and has 2-3 spelling tests per month - same as last year.

Re: 3rd Grade Spellings

There are different schools of thought with spelling tests. Many think that a spelling test doesn't actually help the kid retain the spelling pattern. I teach 1st and disagree. I think it holds students accountable, especially for high frequency words/sight words. That said, spelling and reading comprehension are 2 different areas in the curriculum. I'd express concern to your daughters teacher about her spelling. You could always do your own spelling test at home to supplement. Just an idea.
My d's is in 2nd. She's a horrific speller and does have tests.

Re: 3rd Grade Spellings

My 2nd grader gets weekly spelling words and has a spelling test every Friday

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Re: 3rd Grade Spellings

Thanks everyone. I was going to ask her teacher to point me in the direction or sight words for 3rd graders that the common core recognizes seen as that is the curriculum that she is following. I feel its important that when my DD writes a page on a subject that the majority of the words are spelled correctly. The teacher / school feels that the content is more important and that DD grasps the context of what she wrote. I disagree.

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2nd grader sporatic testing, 4th grader every week and pretty hard words. In 3rd each kid had a different spelling list which was taken from words they spelled wrong in their assignments.

Re: 3rd Grade Spellings

Honestly, even if there were a lot of spelling tests it may not actually help the spelling in a paragraph. I know it sounds strange but this happened with my son. This year (4th grade) it's MUCH better but up until now he's been sounding words out and writing them the way he hears them. They had weekly spelling tests and he would get 100 on all of them but when writing a paragraph he would still do it by sounding them out. I thought it was so cute for a while then I was concerned. The teachers told me it would work itself out and it actually does.

3rd Grade Spellings

my 2nd grader has spelling tests every friday - she practices about 20 words during the week but the test only has 10 of those 20 words on it

Re: 3rd Grade Spellings

Both my 2nd and 4th grader have weekly spelling tests. My 4th grader - his teacher uses vocabulary words over the standard spelling word list because she feels the standard words are too simple (he's in a adv class). She makes them use the words in a sentence as well which I like (at least 10 word sentence not starting with the word I). When he was in third grade he also had weekly spelling tests.

3rd Grade Spellings

My second graders gets two weeks of spelling words and a test at the end of the 2 weeks.