My Venn Diagram from class!

Looking at the Tompkins reading (pg. 169) and reflecting on my students writing samples, I would place my students (whom are in second grade) at "Stage 2: Letter-Name Alphabetic Spelling". The reason I chose this stage was because several of my students are having the same problem when it comes to writing. The main issues are: using the correct letter for like sounds (i.e. using "c" for "k" or vis versa) and using the correct vowel when writing a word. I would place my students in this stage because I feel they still need to do a better job of understanding the significance of a letter and its sound. Some students also still write in a ll caps which i read about in Tompkins that that is a sign for a student in this stage. Another thing I read in this chapter was that some students are still using single letters to describe a word. Although my students don't use single letter I've noticed that they use a shorter amount of letter when it comes to sounding out a difficult word for them (i.e. "volcanoes" is spelled "vcnos" or "with" is spelled "wt"). Along with this spelling issue many of the students use incorrect short vowels because they aren't attempting to sound it out or don't know which vowel is correct. I think based on several of the students work I would place them all in this stage 2.

As far as a literacy center I would create for these students I would definitely want to focus on sounding out words so that students can realize all the letters it takes to construct a word and also hearing what letter fits in the word. I think having activities like using short words to emphasize vowel and letter choice would be good activities. For example, putting letters like "cat", "bat", "rat", "set", etc on cards would be good for students because then they would begin to understand the meaning of the word even when only one letter changes. I would also want to do activities like having the students read aloud to me because I want to see how they are reading the word and maybe if that's hindering how the spell. I know several students pronounce "with" like "wit" so that's what they write and I think that can hurt they're writing ability. I think these activities are just a start to some much needed practice for these students but I want to make sure I focus on sounding out words and letters as a big emphasis in all of my activities.