An assessment of a pupil’s writing ability

I have had ample opportunity to observe the year one’s writing, and it has been quite interesting. The two main points I want to look at are spelling and letter formation because examples of these represent the child’s level of development and how they view our language. I chose not to look too closely at handwriting as it’s based more upon fine motor skills than the knowledge of language.

A lot of the children in this year 1 class have speech and language difficulties, which makes it very hard to teach them how to spell. If they can’t say the word properly or sound it out then they can hardly be expected to get it right. There is a lot of very good phonics provision within the school so subsequently most children are good at sounding out words, but even though they can get the phonemes right on how they say the word, the actual way they pronounce it is wrong. Strong accents can be a cause for some very strange spellings, to give an example of this I actually saw a child write cus instead of because.

There is a mix up with letter sounds and letter names. I noticed a rather amusing example of this in a phonics lesson; the children were asked to write tight and all of them wrote tit instead. This is quite excusable as the letter i is pronounced eye. They have been taught the tri-graph igh but don’t apply it. The other common spelling mistake similar this is writing pla and mak instead of play and make. Again the mix up is with the a sound. Strangely was is often spelt correctly and I put this down to the fact it has a spelling rule that has been well remembered, although there are plenty examples of wus.

The children are well trained to get aids to help them sound out but not all know what to do with them once they have them. Good examples of use of are using white boards to practice writing tricky words before writing it in the book. Coupled with this is using the jolly phonics sheet to find the correct grapheme. At the same time I witnessed a child who took a white board and didn’t do anything with it as well as having a help sheet they didn’t look at. She then complained that she couldn’t do it. Both children were at the same level. An incident my partner spoke about was that of a child using the letter sheet to trace the letters before writing them down. This is great use of tools but sadly it had very little effect and the work was still illegible.   

There are some key letters that nearly all the children seem to have trouble with writing. The letter e is often written backwards. The letter y is written as a u for some children and sometimes they mix up w and u. What I have observed in one child is her tendency to represent words with a single letter. She is not in a low ability group but will very often write down just a letter for a word. Some children only write the first letter of a word but this child will write a whole string of irrelevant letters. I asked her to write found and she wrote y. MY partner noticed that she will sometimes just write hihihi. This same child also puts capital letters I strange places, even when copying what I have written she will use capital letter. One child who is on P levels will only write the letter J.

Nearly all of the children enjoy writing, writing their name is enjoyable. What does happen is that they will get carried away or rush their work and what I get is a piece of work that is just a string of letters. Sometimes these can be made out to words that make sense but other times they mean nothing. What the children see is another matter. They sometimes know what it says, when they don’t they can sound it out.