As I was flipping through the May 2008 issue of The Reading Teacher, I found an article entitled "My eSorts and Digital Extensions of Word Study" by Tricia A. Zucker and Marcia Invernizzi. I was intrigued by the title because my first grade team had recently been working with our literacy coach at school to do more word sorting with our students. I started reading the article and was very impressed with the study. The article did a awesome job of summarizing the study so I'll try my best to summarize the summary. This team of researchers came up with a 5-day eSorting process with a first grade class. 9 students were paired with a one-on-one tutor. The first day the students dictated an experience story to their tutor and the tutor used power point to turn it into a digital story. On the second day they started the first draft of the student's personalized eSort. The third day they added words to the eSort from the digital story and other texts the student had read. On the fourth day they practiced the eSort and put the finishing touches on the digital story. The last day was spent sharing their digital stories and eSorts. I was really impressed with this student because this would be another mode for students to do word sorts. I also really liked the idea of having the students go through past stories to add words that fit into their eSorts. My cynical mind started wondering where I would ever find enough one-on-one help to attempt this project with my students. However, I think this activity was really rich in literacy and word work and something I would like to attempt someday.
2 comments:
So the words that they were sorting were from their story? Did they decide on the catagory headers together? Sounds very interesting. That is our whole spelling program - word sorts. could be a cool program for Ankeny to look at. Can you copy the article?
I need to find this article! Sounds very interesting. I did word sorts with my 2nd grade students all the time - and really liked it! This would be a nice way to integrate technology into that process.
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