Spelling assessment, syllable types, & spelling intervention – with Dr. Shelley Blackwell

TRT Podcast #153: Spelling assessment, syllable types, & intervention – with Dr. Shelley Blackwell

Dr. Shelley Blackwell and I discuss all things spelling – from spelling assessment to spelling intervention. We also talk about whether it’s useful to teach spelling rules and syllable types.

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Hello! Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and in today's episode, I was able to speak with the delightful Dr. Shelley Blackwell. She's an expert in many things and one of them is spelling, so today we got to talk all about spelling. We talked about how we can use our understanding of phonology, morphology, and orthography to figure out where the gaps are in a student's spelling. We talked about her view on syllable types and also some ideas for spelling intervention. Here we go!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Dr. Blackwell!

Shelley Blackwell: Hi! Thanks for having me!

Anna Geiger: So you have quite a background and experience in so many things, but today we're going to focus just on spelling.

Can you introduce us to yourself? Tell us how you got into education and all the things that you're experienced in.

Shelley Blackwell: Sure, sure. So I'm actually a fourth-generation educator. I went into education and wasn't sure that's exactly what I wanted, and then I discovered the field of speech language pathology and thought that was the perfect blend of medical, like how the brain works, combined with teaching and education. So that's where I started my graduate work at the University of Kansas.

I spent some time working in a reading clinic and was trained in Lindamood-Bell, and that got me hooked on literacy, watching kids and adults learn how to read. I was hooked then, and then I was a school-based speech pathologist for 22 years and became really passionate about literacy instruction, remediation, and spreading the word about structured literacy even before our district did it. I had a principal who was very, very supportive of me going into classrooms and teaching some phonics and doing some things like that to help students. So that was really fun.

Then I finished my doctorate at the University of Kansas. I have given them a lot of my money, all three of my degrees are from KU.

Then I started this role that I'm currently in for our school district as an MTSS literacy support specialist. A team of us are supporting all 36 of our elementary schools, 10 middle schools, and 5 high schools, plus our alternative education centers. We're helping teachers learn about structured literacy, how to make that shift in their instruction from balanced literacy to structured literacy, and then implementing the MTSS process with not just their core instruction in Tier 1, but moving through the intensification of their instruction. We're helping them understand the different layers of that, Tier 2, targeting a certain skill, and Tier 3, intensifying, before we even talk about special education referrals.

We've done a lot of work with universal screening and interpreting data and just trying to help teachers become data users to drive their instruction. I think as district teachers we tend to collect data and let the district look at it and say, "Yes, you're on track," or, "No, you're not." But we're really helping teachers look at their class data and their students to see who needs what, and then figuring out what that what is and how to deliver it. It's an awesome job.

Anna Geiger: That's wonderful.

When we think about teachers making the move from balanced to structured literacy, a lot of questions I hear revolve around spelling, as in, "How is this supposed to look different than what I was doing?" or, "What does spelling instruction look like in a structured literacy classroom?"

As we think back to traditional spelling instruction, can you think of some practices or things we've done that maybe weren't aligned with the research?

Shelley Blackwell: Certainly. So in the past, we tended to do the Monday pre-test. You give a list of words, send them home, and have students do rainbow writing with their spelling words, or write them five times, practice with parents, and then come back Friday for the test. There may have been some implicit instruction throughout the week about a spelling word or spelling pattern, but it didn't tend to be explicit.

Now we know that the spelling brain is the reading brain. Spelling and reading are both parts of language, and we have to use lots of layers of that in order to spell.

In the past when we would send home word lists, study, and come back on Friday to take the test, they may do well on Friday. Maybe their words are great, but their sentences aren't. Then maybe next week when you reviewed those words on the next spelling test, they have forgotten them. That's because we didn't ever teach them; we didn't get into the word analysis.

I like to call spelling now word study, because it's not a memorization process. In fact, on my website, I say something like that. Spelling is a thinking process, not a memorization task.

In the past, like you said, in balanced literacy, we would just try to memorize our spelling words. Parents loved that because that was something they could do on the way to soccer practice or at the breakfast table, and they could just drill those.

But as we've seen in the droves of kids who have gone through the balanced literacy schooling, their spelling isn't the greatest. So as we move to structured literacy, we lean on the research to help us know what our instruction should look like.

We can get into that part, but I think, additionally, in the craziness of the school day, in the busyness, if something had to give in your instructional time, it was spelling. It was, "Okay, we've got an assembly and I don't have time to teach everything. I can't skip math. I can't skip reading. It's got to be spelling." Spelling was kind of the instructional casualty when time ran out because it wasn't explicit teaching.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. When I think back to maybe eras in the United States where there was more of a focus on phonics, I think there still was even then probably a focus on memorizing letters in order versus understanding why words are spelled a certain way.

I think another issue that we have sometimes too that I still see is spelling lists that aren't connected by phonics pattern. It's a vocabulary list, which then automatically lends itself to memorization, because what you learn for one word cannot be transferred to the next word. You're basically having to memorize 20 spellings instead of learning a pattern or something about language that would help you and that you could apply.

Shelley Blackwell: Exactly. Exactly.

Anna Geiger: Can you talk a little bit more about why spelling is a thinking process and not a memorization task?

Shelley Blackwell: Yeah. So when you really think about spelling, I go back to the reading brain because we know there are three parts especially that help us with decoding words. The phonological processor, being able to know the sounds in words, the orthographic processor which helps us associate the sounds and the letters, and then there's a meaning processor, too. All of those pieces work together to help us decode.

Well, similarly, spelling is that way too. An example I give in some of my talks is the word "kicked." If I say, "Anna, would you spell the word, kicked," you can just whip it out because you have it in your sight word vocabulary. However, your brain has done a lot of work to make that decision.

Initially, your brain triggers the phonological processor, "What are the sounds in 'kicked'?" So you think /k/ /��/ /k/ /t/. Hear are those sounds.

Well, now your orthographic processor has to think, "What are the spellings I could use? Well, if I think about /k/, I could spell it with a K, I could spell it with a C, I could spell it with a CK, or I could spell it with a CH. I've got lots of choices on how to spell /k/, but I have to think about the placement of that sound in the word. I'm not going to use CK at the beginning of a word to spell /k/, and in this word, I can't use a C to spell that sound because there's an I after it. When C is followed by an E, I, or Y, it makes the /s/ sound."

So your brain is having to do all of this thinking, not only about hearing the sounds in words, but then going through your orthographic Rolodex, so to speak, of what choices do I have, and then the rules of our language of where those sounds can be spelled in different places in words.

Then you're going to go into the fact of that last sound /t/. "Well, I could spell /t/ with a T or a D sometimes because ED spells /t/ in some words, you know?" Like in kicked, it's ED. Spoiler alert.

But you should also be thinking about the morphological components. So I think, "I kicked the ball, well, that's an action that's already happened. I took 'kick,' made it past tense, and I use regular past tense marker ED, which makes the sound /t/."

All of that thinking goes into play when you're deciding to spell a word, therefore it is a thinking process. You have to think your way through hearing the sounds in words, figuring out what representations work with it, and then throw in an unfair or irregular word and you have a whole new ball game. All those pieces have to go into it.

You can memorize some words, and memory does play a role in learning how to spell, but I was reading a research article and they said something about how adults can spell 10,000-20,000 words, but we've only actually been taught about 3,800. That really speaks to a few things, the process that we need to be aware of as we're spelling an unfamiliar word, but it also speaks to the different ways that our brain learns how to spell.

And so, there are a couple routes that we can talk about like the lexical route and the non-lexical route. We already have that word, "kicked," locked in our sight word vocabulary; it's a lexical route word for us. We just tap into it and write it down.

But if it's a word we didn't know how to spell, now we're going into the non-lexical route. We're deciding, "What are the sounds? What are my options?" We're doing that metacognitive process that it's becoming upfront, surfacing, so I have to sound those words out.

Spelling, as we used to think of it, was just memorize these words and go. If you memorize and then go, you might do well in isolation on that Friday test, but they aren't yours. You don't own them, for most kids, especially kids with dyslexia or other language-based literacy problems. That's not how they learn them.

We really have to teach kids how to do the word analysis, to look at the structure of those words, and, as you alluded to earlier, teach words in patterns for our spelling list instead of words that go with our story or words that go with our theme for vocabulary instead.

One thing we've done in our district is to really try to reframe our language from spelling to word study, from pre-test to introduction, because we're introducing a pattern to students and we're going to study that pattern. Then instead of your post test, it's now an application measure. Can you apply what we've learned? Can you apply what we've talked about?

Anna Geiger: Sometimes we talk about people being natural spellers and not so natural spellers. I have called myself that before, a natural speller, like if I saw the words, I knew them, and I never studied for a spelling test ever. Except I remember I always missed a couple words on the IE/EI list because I didn't know all those and I didn't study them. But with my mom, she and I think she's dyslexic, but that was never diagnosed, but she still really struggles with spelling.

The difference we might be able to say would be that some people, if you teach them in this kind of memorization way, they kind of pick up those patterns without a lot of direct instruction. But other people really need you to break down why we spell things certain ways before they can start to map those spellings.

It's an interesting way to think about it, how some people-

Shelley Blackwell: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Like in the same way we learn about reading, how some people kind of pick it up rather quickly no matter how they're taught, and other people, like a large percentage, really need that explicit instruction. We can think about that with our spelling too.

Shelley Blackwell: I think those are the same kids who are successful in a balanced literacy classroom because they saw something and they could implicitly teach themselves, and then apply that to things that they'd seen before. But we know that's not the majority of kids.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and we also know that that explicit instruction in how words work can benefit everyone, including the spelling too. Also, it's true that with many kids, they are good at reading, but their spelling is lagging behind because they didn't get that explicit spelling instruction.

You did such a nice job of explaining how phonology, orthography, and morphology all kind of connect together when it comes to spelling. I know that some people have used their knowledge of those areas when assessing spelling. They'll see a word and they'll be able to say, "Well, this is a phonological error or so on." Can you talk about that a little bit and maybe give us some examples of how a child's spelling can tell us what they know about words?

Shelley Blackwell: Oh my gosh. This is one of my favorite things to talk about. I like to take a student's connected writing sample, so maybe a journal entry, an essay, something where they are just writing because when you look at a student's writing, I say it's the window to their literacy world because you can see so many components of our structured literacy pillars in there and their spelling.

I can look at a word and say, "They left out some sounds in that word, so that must mean that there's something phonological happening. If they're leaving out blends, if they're switching sounds around, then something in their brain isn't perceiving those sounds in the right order." Now maybe in isolation they can do it, but it's a red flag to me if I see it in connected writing that I need to look into that a little deeper and kind of do a diagnostic on that.

I'm going to go back a second. The reason why a connected writing sample is so powerful is because your cognitive load is so heavy when you're writing a story, a reflection. Not only are you trying to figure out your ideas, but you're also thinking about letter formation and handwriting and spacing and punctuation, and do my sentences make sense, do I need a new paragraph, how do I connect this? All those things are happening on top of how do I spell the word? It's really a good measure of how are you applying this and how are you generalizing everything you've been taught?

So I can look at phonology. For orthography, I can look at words and say, "Well, they spelled it phonetically, but they didn't spell it the way the dictionary would spell it."

For instance, I had a fifth grader write about when she got her first cellphone. She spelled cellphone, S-E-L-L-F-O-N-E. My first thought was, "She heard all the sounds in the words, her phonological processor is alive and well. It's working on those." But orthographically, she wasn't thinking about the PH for the F, and meaning-wise, she wasn't able to make that distinction between, "sell," like I'm going to sell you something so you can buy it, versus "cell" as in cellular. There's a meaning component too. I can look at all of those pieces just from how she spelled that.

I can also look at morphology to see are they putting the right endings? She spelled the word, "highest," like the highest building, H-I-Y-I-S-T, and so that told me she didn't have that superlative comparative piece of it using EST. She didn't realize that we added this superlative onto the word, high, H-I-G-H. How she spells let me into how she's processing all of the layers of language.

That is one thing I did for all of my language evaluations, even if it wasn't literacy-based, if it was language, because I wanted to see how they were doing with all this. I can look at syntax as well, and semantics. I can look at all those pieces, but we're just focusing on spelling.

I do a POM analysis, LETRS has a POSM, there are lots of different terms for it, but I look just at phonology, orthography, and morphology.

Out of their sample, I write down the words that they misspelled, the correct spelling, and then I look through it and say, "What kind of error was this? Was this phonology? Orthography? Morphology?" Then I can look for my trends.

I'm working on a matrix where we can think about what type of error they're having, is it phonological, orthographic, morphological, and then what phase of spelling are they in? If I have a fifth grader who can't spell CVCE words, but they're working on multisyllable words in class, am I really going to work on multisyllable spelling with them? Nope.

Anna Geiger: Right.

Shelley Blackwell: Because developmentally, they're not there yet. I want to make it connect so you can click on the skill and then go to an intervention or something.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that would be awesome.

Shelley Blackwell: That's my little brain child that I'm, in all my free time, working on.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. That would be exciting, very exciting, because I think once you just figure out the difference between those three things, phonology, orthography, and morphology, and being able to analyze words, then the hard part is "Well, now what? What exactly do I do?"

Shelley Blackwell: Exactly.

Anna Geiger: Within the science of reading community, there are different approaches, of course, to teaching spelling and phonics. There are disagreements about the importance of spelling rules and too many rules, what's too many, what's too few.

What's your perspective on spelling rules and what needs to be taught? Also, what would you say in terms of, should kids be able to actually say the rule or is it enough for you to teach it and have them apply it? How do you see that?

Shelley Blackwell: I don't teach spelling rules. I teach spelling patterns because there seems to be exceptions to rules. Most rules you can find something where it doesn't work, but the pattern typically is the majority, so I do think it's important to teach those patterns explicitly.

Part of that is just the qualitative experiences of we've taught it implicitly and it hasn't really worked. My kids, my own children, are not great spellers because they went through the implicit spelling instruction. I do think it's important to teach those patterns.

However, I do disagree with teaching so many at a huge depth. I think sometimes we may go overboard. I think in Tier 1, it's a lot more important to say those and to pull that in during the phonics lesson, but in your Tier 2, in the speech language pathologist's room, the resource room, my view was, "I get you for this amount of time. I don't have time to teach every single thing in the English language, so I'm going to teach you the highest impact, highest leverage patterns: DGE and GE, CE and K, vowel teams. Just the main vowel teams, not all of them." We definitely need to explicitly teach them patterns, but I think we can get so caught up in the weeds of trying to teach all the patterns that we lose the purpose of it.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Do you think it's important for kids to be able to say the pattern, like, in a single syllable word after a short vowel, spell "K" with CK? Do you think that's important, or is it enough for the teacher to teach it?

Shelley Blackwell: My experience mostly is from intervention and remediation in the special education setting, and so I know that those students were probably the true dyslexics. They need as many different modalities as possible to learn, and so I found great success with that if they could articulate it. It didn't have to be my words, but they could say, "I use CK when it's a one-letter vowel, and K the rest of the time." If they could articulate it so that I knew they understood the concept, that was acceptable to me.

Anna Geiger: Sure.

Shelley Blackwell: But I think there probably are some kids out there that need that repetitive verbiage over and over and over in order for it to click in and move to their long-term memory. So I'm definitely a case-by-case kind of person, but I do think it's important in Tier 1 that teachers are saying the same thing with the same verbiage to their students to build that base because that's going to be enough for most kids.

Anna Geiger: And that leads to the importance of a shared high quality curriculum so that you have the same verbiage.

Shelley Blackwell: Right.

Anna Geiger: And also for teachers to have that knowledge too. There are a lot of books that are shared in social media groups like "The ABC's and All Their Tricks" and "Uncovering the Logic of English." Do you have any other books that you recommend for helping teachers improve their spelling knowledge?

Shelley Blackwell: "Uncovering the Logic of English" is probably my favorite. I haven't found a ton that I've... I have some and I've looked through them and I feel, "Meh, this is okay. This is kind of helpful," but I haven't found a lot that would be great for somebody who's just starting in their quest of it.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Shelley Blackwell: Which makes me feel like maybe I should write one. Maybe I should write something because-

Anna Geiger: Yeah. That sounds good!

Shelley Blackwell: Lyn Stone has "Spelling for Life," and her work is really good, but there's definitely not the same selection for spelling as there is for decoding and reading.

Anna Geiger: Agreed.

Shelley Blackwell: The pool is a lot smaller.

Anna Geiger: Agreed.

Let's talk about a divisive topic in the science of reading community, and that is syllable types. Some people don't believe that syllable types are important to teach and others do. I had a linguist comment on one of my Facebook posts recently that the only two types of syllables are open and closed. What is your perspective on syllable types, if they should be taught, and how and why?

Shelley Blackwell: I like syllable types. I do think they are helpful to be taught. For the students who are naturals anyway, I think they find it interesting, so it doesn't do them harm to learn them. But again, from the lens of my students through my remediation, it gave them a structure for words that they could look at.

So instead of seeing a word with a string of letters going, "Where do I even start?" they had some strategies of, "Okay. Let me find my vowels. Let me look at the syllable types. Okay. This one could be closed or open, which means it could be a short vowel or a long vowel." They had a place to go as a roadmap. I think for decoding, it's very helpful.

I think for spelling it's very helpful too. Especially vowel-R, because you can start to think about, "Okay. I hear that /ER/ sound, but is it in the context of the vowel sound in that, so do I need a vowel plus an R? Or is it in a blend or something where it's a consonant?"

I do also think we can get a little in the weeds of SO stuck on, "You have to identify that syllable type," that we forget to generalize words and use uncontrolled text.

My path when I'm teaching kids about reading or spelling is, "Okay. We've got to teach syllables. Now let's put it in an uncontrolled text and see what you do. When you're writing, we're going to go back and find the words that you aren't sure about. Which ones do you think you may have misspelled? Underline those." Then we go back and I'll say, "What is the word? What are the syllables? What types? Does that match what you have?"

So again, it just gives me some talking points and a roadmap to help them think their way through that. And then we can go syllable by syllable if we need to.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. That's a good point that we need to be thinking about what the end goal is here. Syllable-type work can be very time-consuming, like syllable division and syllable types. I think we just have to be careful. It can be tricky when you have a program that you're required to use, but always remember that the point of it is to help them with decoding and spelling, not to do an isolated activity.

Shelley Blackwell: Right. I think we kind of sometimes get into arguments, or not arguments, but good discussions. I'll have teachers text me and say, "How do you split this word up?"

For instance, if it's a "TION" word, a T-I-O-N, do you put the T on the I-O-N, or do you put it on the syllable before? It really then taps into your morphology. Does the T belong to the syllable before because it's part of that morpheme?

Anna Geiger: Yeah.

Shelley Blackwell: I-O-N is really the morpheme, but then again we also think of T-I-O-N as a syllable, like a "TION." We use T-I-O-N. When you spell it, when you read it, does it really matter where the T went? Probably not.

Anna Geiger: Right. It's the weeds again.

Shelley Blackwell: Yep, yep. Yep.

Anna Geiger: For sure.

So you mentioned before that previously there was the problem with the pre-test and then the post test on Friday. Is there a place for a weekly spelling test if they're receiving that explicit instruction all week versus, "Here's a list of words to memorize?" What's your perspective on that?

Shelley Blackwell: Absolutely there's a place for it, and in my opinion, the pre-test is more important than the post test because your pre-test is your formative assessment. The pre-test is the one that says, "How many of my students already know this pattern? How many of these students don't know this pattern? Is it a phonological error? Is it an orthographic error? Where are we in that process?" So then that helps me design my instruction for that week. It helps me know which of those students I need to pull in a little small group for five minutes and do an extra explicit differentiated small group on that pattern.

For me, it's not so much of what's my student's grade in spelling, but what's my instruction? How's my instruction doing? Are they learning what I'm teaching? That's my measure.

But spelling also is twofold because there's the isolation words, the list, and do they have the knowledge of the pattern? Then if sentence dictation is fine, I would also like to take, like I said, a writing sample. If I had a classroom, that's what I would be doing because that shows me the application of it.

For instance, if we worked on AI/AY, I want to see are they able to use that, apply that, and generalize that in their writing, not just in the list?

Anna Geiger: What would you say are some of the good ways to practice spelling? I know you mentioned rainbow writing, and that's basically just writing all the letters in order without really thinking about what the letters are for. So what would you say are good ways to practice spelling words, either in school or at home?

Shelley Blackwell: There are a few different things that we've shared with parents, but also in small group or in my therapy room, definitely including sound-spelling mapping. For our parent connection, we've given them a bank of 20 to 30 words that follow that pattern. In that bank are the introduction words and the application words so that they are seeing those as well some others to fill that in so parents can practice sound-spelling mapping at home with their student. Again, with lots of supports for them, cheat sheets and things like that, until they learn. That's a great way to do it.

Additionally word sorts with patterns are really good. DGE and GE. AI, AY, A consonant E. Doing word sorts is supported in the research as well because your brain is starting to look at those patterns and the placement of those patterns. That's tapping into that orthographic processor of, for instance, CK. You can't use that at the beginning, so it's going here at the end. So word sorts are another way.

Word analogies are great ways to practice too, which kind of ties in with word families. So if you think of a word with long vowel silent E and long A, cake, can you think of another word with long vowel silent E? So you're starting to find other words with that pattern. Those would be some easy-ish ways.

We have to build up some automaticity with those as well. That's how we move it to our sight word vocabulary, meaning that bank of words that we know automatically.

There are some visual parts that go with it. You can also do some saying, "Okay, our pattern is long E with EE together in a word. Let's spell some words." And we do it like the old days where we would say on the way to church, "Spell the word this. Spell the word this. Sound stretch it. Spell it." All of those things work.

The difference between doing that practice then in our old days and now is that they've been explicitly taught the pattern, how to sound out the word, and we're also attuned to the fact of if they are hearing the sounds in words. Because if you can't hear the sounds in words, then you're not going to spell the sounds in words. I like to have kids finger stretch first and then spell it.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and that brings me to thinking about high frequency words too like it's not that flash cards are always bad, but if we're starting with that as a memorization tool, that's a problem. But if you've explicitly taught them and you're building toward automaticity that makes more sense.

This will be our last question. What tips do you have for choosing and designing spelling interventions? If that's an area of weakness for a child, what specifically do you like to do?

Shelley Blackwell: Oh goodness, this is a hard question. It's a hard place also because of a lot of things, I think. Like we said earlier, we've spent so much focus on helping kids in learning how to decode and read. In spelling and writing, these things are starting to come along, but I know have teachers who have said to me, "They can decode. They can pass all of the phonics screener, but their spelling's atrocious. What do I do?"

That's partly why I want to write some interventions where I can say just click here and take it and go.

In your Tier 2, instead of decoding, you're working on spelling. Some of those things could include word sorts with patterns. It could include... I do an activity speech to spelling mapping where it's very intentional of asking what are the sounds and how do you spell that sound. Then I had always had students spell it the way they thought, and then I teach that phonics pattern.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Shelley Blackwell: So if it's long vowel silent E, and they write "plane" like P-L-A-N, then I point to the A and say, "What sound are you thinking of for this?"

And they say, "/��/."

I say, "Do you have any other ways you could spell /��/ besides the one A by itself?" We talk through it.

If they don't, I tell them, "This one is A consonant E. Let's try to write it in that word," and then we practice a few more of those. That's kind of the teaching point.

I've done some word chains with those different patterns.

Jamey Peavler talks a lot about blocked practice and interleaving practice. I love that because when we're teaching the acquisition of that skill, we need to teach it in blocked practice: same, same, same, same.

As they start to get that pattern, then I'm going to do some interleaving practice. For instance, if I'm doing DGE, I'm going to throw some GE's in there as well, so they have to make that decision, "Okay, it's a short vowel with /j/ at the end. I know I have to use GE, but I also have to use DGE here. Wait, this vowel has two letters. I just use GE." They are having to do that force forgetfulness to think about what they're doing.

Word chains are great for that interleaving practice.

Then I always, always, always include some connected writing even if it's just sentence dictation, because I want to see if they can apply the pattern we just talked about.

Those are some things that I include in my interventions with students when we're working on a pattern.

Anna Geiger: So basically the best practices that you're already using with the rest of your class, but broken down into more practice and more examples?

Shelley Blackwell: It's more targeted.

Anna Geiger: Which is a lot we know about reading as well.

Shelley Blackwell: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Well, thank you for sharing all of this. We covered so many things today!

Shelley Blackwell: Good!

Anna Geiger: Where can people learn more about you and the resources that you have?

Shelley Blackwell: I have a website that I house the things that I write. It's all open-source. I don't know if we can link that in the notes, it's called Literacy Through Language. It's not fancy, it's a free Google website, but I put things that I write for orthography and morphology, and then I place resources for if you want to learn some more. My email and my Twitter are on there. I'm on Twitter at @sblackwellslpd. I'd love to connect that way.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much!

Shelley Blackwell: Thank you so much for having me. This is fun to talk shop.

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode153. We'll talk more about spelling next week!

Closing: That's all for this episode of Triple R Teaching. For more educational resources, visit Anna at her home base, themeasuredmom.com and join our teaching community. We look forward to helping you reflect, refine, and recharge on the next episode of Triple R Teaching.

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Resources mentioned in this episodeDr. Blackwell’s website, Literacy Through Language The ABC’s and All Their Tricks , by Margaret M. Bishop Uncovering the Logic of English , by Denise Eide Spelling for Life , by Lyn Stone

The post Spelling assessment, syllable types, & spelling intervention – with Dr. Shelley Blackwell appeared first on The Measured Mom.