Reading Behaviors
- begin to focus more on finding familiar patterns or chunks within words
- need context clues less as they decode, but still may use the text to help them figure out unknown words
- begin to read silently, without needing to vocalize
- reading becomes more fluent as they are able to think past word-by-word to phrase-by-phrase
- comprehension comes more naturally as they don’t have to spend as much time decoding and can focus more on comprehending
- self-correct when text doesn’t make sense
- non-fiction is typically harder for them to comprehend than fiction because of its specific vocabulary, text features and text structures
- sight word vocabulary greatly increases
(WTW 3rd ed, 23 & Reading Development)
Spelling Behaviors
- are comfortable spelling short vowel words (CVC)
- as spellers progress within the stage they:
- spell r-influenced words correctly (words with ir, er, ur, and or)
- spell less frequently used vowel patterns correctly (such as toil or chew)
- learn how to spell most one-syllable long vowel words, but will still confuse sometimes
- towards the end of the stage, spellers can spell most any regular one-syllable word (words like weight may still confuse them)
WTW calls them Within Word Pattern Spellers
(WTW 3rd ed, 16 & Stages of Spelling Development