Writing Woes

So we arrived to tutor today and the class was taking a quick test on their vocabularly workbooks called Avenues. The test was split into two seperate groups: the greens were the kids who are reading on the Second Grade reading level, and the pinks and yellows were the kids who are just below reading level or who need a lot of help with their spelling and reading (Norbit being in the pink category, means he's almost at reading level). It was a bit of a confusing day it looked like; there was a new student in the class and he seemed to be having trouble understanding a lot of what was going on. After the pinks and yellows had finished thier test, they were told to finish thier writing assignments. The assignment was to make a list of safety rules for Trick or Treating. Norbit appeared to be done, but when Ms. Taylor asked him about his work, he hadn't written anything. She asked me if we could work on that together for part of our reading time.
When we got out into the hallway and were settled on our dots, I asked Martin if I could take a look at his assignment notebook. He had hardly written anything on any of the assignments throughout the first quarter! He wrote the title of the assignment and left the rest of the page blank. I asked him why he never wrote anything, to which he responded that writing "made him nervous". When asked why he was uncomfortable writing, he said that he didn't know how to spell a lot of things. So we started working on his assignment, and I set a goal to come up with 5 rules for safe candy gathering. Well the first thing he wrote down was the a rule was to dress up and get candy. So I had to explain what Ms. Taylor was looking for, and after he understood a little better it was much easier to go over simple rules like looking both ways when crossing the street, and never going out alone.
Norbit really enjoys the letter switching activity that we do, which surprises me. He "isn't good at spelling" but he does really well with changing letters of words to make new words. His big problem with spelling is that he spells things the way he hears them. When he spells costume for example, he spells it kowstom. Something that I have learned is that if I can find something catchy to say about things, kids usually remember them. So to help Norbit with his "costume problem" I told him to remember that there were no cows in his costume this year. After that he spelt the word really easily, the e on the end and the c instead of the k he caught onto very quickly. We did some high frequency suns with some of his missed Dolch words, and he actually asked if we could do more of the letter switching activity. Why not? He is comfortable doing this because he excels at it... so why not encourage him to do some more... We also played the First Grade candy land today, and he only had trouble on a few words... he cheated tremendously today though, but he was very nice... he picked one of the go back some spaces cards on purpose because he knew he was winning and told me he felt bad for me and wanted me to win. I thought that was cute. I had him laughing at me today as well, because I asked him if he understood Spanish. When he said he did, I responded in Spanish that I do not understand a lot. He looked at me and said "well you know that... you know Spanish!" After this he was much more comfortable talking to me. He goes through his assignments rather quickly, so I need to find more to do with him next week, I think I might find a short book that is at his reading level, and that will be the book that we read a little at a time each visit, so he can listen for the fluency in my own reading; this being a suggestion from Ms. Taylor, I might as well try it, he enjoys listening to me read books.