Monster Spelling Inventory

I spent 2 days this week at Common Core Training and had the opportunity to sit next to a wonderful teacher from a neighboring school district.  She was so much fun and had so many great ideas.  I'm not sure how long she's been teaching but I'm guessing maybe 20-25 years?  Anyways, I LOVED that she was still excited about finding new teaching ideas and that she was so willing to share all her great ideas!

As we were talking about ways to assess she mentioned what she called the "Monster" test.  (Doesn't that sound like fun?)  Anyways, the Monster test turned out to be a Developmental Spelling Inventory.  It's a test that has been around awhile (at least since 1985) but it's the first time I've ever heard of it. 

I e-mailed my co-workers the link right away and before I even left the meeting for the day Tina (one of my coworkers) had e-mailed a recording sheet for us so that we could give the test the following day.  (I have the best coworkers!)

The next day I returned to work and gave the test.  VERY COOL!  After analyzing my students tests I found that they ranged anywhere from Semi Phonetic to Transitional.  Here are 3 of the tests:

The little girl who took this test is on an IEP and receives resource room help and speech and language interventions.  She and 2 others in my class scored in what would be considered the "Semi Phonetic" range. They could identify the beginning sound of most of the words.

This little guy scored in the "Phonetic" range.  16 of my students scored in this range. You can see they could identify a few more sounds than the kids in the semi phonetic range.

4 of my students scored in the Phonetic/Transitional range.  Again, you can see that they could identify even more sounds than the mostly Phonetic students.

I was an interesting assessment and so cool to hear my kids sounding out these words.  Yeah phoneme segmentation practice!!!

By the way...the words for the test are:

1. monster

2. united

3. dress

4. bottom

5. hiked

6. human

7. eagle

8. closed

9. bumped

10.  typed

If you click the link above to the website it will show you how to score the assessment.

It was a very interesting assessment!