Burst and bubbles

 Having attended a few of these over the years I was surprised by some of the inquiry questions that were chosen and it made me think about more carfefully about mine...

Am I trying to complicate things? 

Am I trying to always think of the next big thing and trying to reinvent the wheel instead of keeping it simple?

For next year I decided I am actually work backwards. Im going to use the Burst and bubble speaking frames as a guide to focus my inquiry path. This could also possible be my titles for my blog posts. 

I am also thinking of asking Robyn Anderson our CoL in school teacher about whether these speaking frames could be used as a means to assist the new teachers we will have in the junior team. 

Explain Everything in Year 1

 This has been a busy term having my own class but also using part of my management day to work in Room 1 showing the year 1 learners and their teacher how to use Explain Everything and its many tools.

It is important for the learners to go into next year where they will be year 2 with some basic iPad skills.

The ones I deemed important are:

How to hold and move with the iPads: hug hold, always hold in your lap if on the mat and leave on a desk when not in use. How to put it on charge and remove it from charge without damaging any chords.

Basic skills: How to find and navigate their class site, how to swipe and clear iPad after using it, how to take a photo using their camera, how to access apps on their iPads not on their class site.

Explain Everything: how to open and EE link, start a new EE, give an EE a title, upload to their drive. We also worked on taking a photo and changing the background colour, accessing the pencil and draw tool and how to add more slides.

The learners are picking up these skills really fast and are attempting to help their teacher become more adept at using them. The concern I have is that over time, less time is being spent mastering these skills during the week thus only leaving them using EE's on a Thursday. One way I could tackle this is to make EE's and add to the class site allowing learners an opportunity to hone their skills over the course of a week. 

Whether this will be bough will only be determined next year when they move onto a new class and they are able to use the basic skills taught without the teacher having to reteach it. 

Back into the Classroom

 I'm back in the classroom! It is exciting to be able to implement some of my learning  this year including learning through play, digital curriculum and Tapasa. 

What I am most concerned with  is ensuring I create a good balance of learning through play and the development of oral language skills with the fundamentals of learning and teaching i.e. pre reading reading and writing skills.

I want to ensure that the learners are transitioned to school and not suddenly faced with formal teaching which in many cases will be the exact opposite of what our learners would have experienced in an ECE environment. 

As we are in the last term of school my planning will be around the key competencies and developing this in our Tamariki.  I am currently looking at how I can adequately reflect this in my planning and accomodate this in my classroom. 

For my class site and planning, I have divided the term into 2 week blocks focussing on 1 big book and having all learning through play, Digital activities and games/ pe sessions related to the book.

The morning session will be focus time with some pre - phonics work, key competencies, maths and pre reading and writing skills.

Some ideas:

Pre phonics - guess the sound, tap the rhythm, I spy

Key competencies - Relating to other, Managing self

Maths - colours, shapes, 1 to 5 number knowledge, same but different

Reading - listening and enjoyment, how to hold a book, telling own stories using pictures

Writing - name, fine motor skills, crossing midline

Digital - Finding the class site, how to hold the ipad

My class site is simple but hopefully effective: 

Assessment Protocols

 Back to school for Term 4 this week and a huge emphasis on assessment protocols. This data is used to write our reports as well as to inform groups at the start of the new year. Teaching will continue to happen after testing/ assessment week with emphasis on consolidating knowledge and reinforcing critical thinking and resilience. Having 2 new teachers in the team since the start of the year, special attention is given to why we have the protocols and how to administer the assessments.

It was interesting to hear the views expressed by teachers on assessments and why and how they are administered. The rationale for having these protocols and testing will be addressed at Team meeting and a buddy system encouraged so we can all help and support each other.

It has made me think more about what testing are we doing?

Why are we doing it?

Can it be streamlined and or adapted? - This would be for school purpose testing and not Manaiakalani testing.

I have made a note to talk more about this with Marie Hirst our Maths Facilitator and ask her assistance in unpacking our current Maths assessment schedule.

CoL in school

 At the beginning of the year I approached Robyn Anderson our in school CoL teacher on how she could assist me with supporting the teachers in the junior school. I found it really hard at the start because I had  a full class of year 1's, 1 year BT teacher, 1 year 2 BT teacher. In term 2 we also employed a new to NZ teacher who was experienced but needed support with understanding and navigating the New Zealand curriculum as well as digital technology. 

Robyn and I planned for her to join us each term for 1 team meeting and then for her to meet with each teacher as a follow up within the same week. Robyn and I also met separately twice a term to ensure that the teachers were heading in the correct direction and how we further needed to support them. My role was to support them with curriculum knowledge, advise them, suggest reading material and evidence based research. Robyn assisted with helping them record their inquiry, suggest blogs etc from other CoL teachers that might have a similar inquiry and to help if inquiry had changed and how to reflect this.

This process has helped extensively in relieving the pressure as well as Robyn being an excellent model for clear, succinct , in depth inquiry. 

CAPS and Magenta

 Today Mrs Salmon, our Reading Recovery Teacher and I had an in depth meeting and look at our current reading wedge graphs and how our resources meet the need of the learners and the teachers. We have noticed that some of our learners are staying for an extended length of time on Magenta books. This is not the pre- reading stage but actually reading every magenta book we have as a resource.  As this is a concern we have decided to cull all readers that does not actually lend itself to successful reading, namely readers with one word on a page, readers that do not use punctuation correctly and readers that are not actually telling a story.

Knowing our learners start with a significant lower literacy knowledge that most of New Zealand, we looked at the Learning Progressions with specific focus on Starting school: 

To know when to move learners on our criteria was set around CAPS specifically:

Early Reading Behaviours Looking at the pictures, memorising text, reading from left to right and pointing to each word.

These are all early reading behaviours and the steppingstone for comprehension would be the pictures and retelling the story no matter how basic. Pictures play an important role in problem solving especially tricky words and therefore the images MUST relate to the story. We also stated that the learner should be recognising between 10 to 20 words. 

Learnings/ Aha moments

Our learners are spending a long time on Magenta books and not roaming around books as pre reading.

Ramblings/ Rumblings

Are we doing our learners a disservice in not moving them along sooner and are we staying in the deficit thinking model?

Effective Maths Warm ups

Today we had Marie Hirst in school helping us with our PD on Maths. Our focus was Effective Maths Warm ups that included Daily Maths. Picture number talks, Odd one out, Solve emoji and Same but different to name a few.  

My New Entrant class will be starting soon, and so my focus on oral language and incorporating the 'talk' into my Maths programme more, lends itself to the same but different task and number talks.  I am also considering how I have done my Maths Calendar work in the past and how by simplifying the Daily Maths Wall initially, how we could build a strong knowledge on number. 

My second train of thought was HOW AM I GOING TO SUPPORT TEACHERS IN MY SYNDICATE WITH INCORPORATING THESE ACTIVITIES INTO THEIR OWN CLASSES. 

one way to assist teachers could be to ask each teacher to share at team meeting one warmup they have tried, what worked, what didnt, how did they adapt and or extend it for their learners and digital capabilities. 

Learning/ Aha moments:

Remember that every moment is a teachable moment. Using the correct terminology sets our learners up for success,

Ramblings/ Rumblings

How to effectively us maths warmup for maintenance,  reasoning,  maths talk,  and fluency.

 

Tapasa

Tapasa is a cultural competency framework for teachers of pacific children. Some important aspects that I have learnt through this PD run by Jeremy:

The Va - the sacred connection between people. Love, Service, family and spirituality.

Jeremy suggested we use this language with parents: The Va : I want to establish the va with you OR the purpose of this meeting is to establish the va. In Samoan can you also say Tauhi va.

Tapasa is all about:

* Cultural confidence

* Connections

* Culture

* Consistency

* Collaboration / collabor action.

My goal is to use this language more with Pacific Island families. 

 

Maths PLD

Today was my first day of having to work with a facilitator and the principal in outlining a plan to implement a professional development plan for the school. The process helped me focus on what I believe the fundamental ideas and foundations in Maths are that will help our learners achieve accelerated shift as well as improve and develop a positive attitude towards mathematics for both teachers and learners. 

This reaffirmed the importance of building strong relationships and knowing, in this case, the staff as well as our learners. The right fit, the right product, the right motivation, the right balance. I look forward to not only working closely with Marie Hirst but also learning from her.

 

New role, new teacher

This term sees me stepping away from the classroom and supporting an experienced teacher, new to New Zealand in navigating the New Zealand curriculum and embrace the Manaiakalani Cluster pedagogy of Learn, Create and Share. 

Balancing learning to get to know the curriculum as well as assisting with learning how to use technology on a daily basis is not an easy task. My main focus is to show the important must know items first. This is to ensure that daily communication and administration can be completed and everyone is always in the know about what is happening. I will also be working through the the google educator certification with the new to NZ teacher. 

        

DFI session 6

Todays session was facilitated by Dorothy and focussed on Enabling Access and being Connected.

Connected: To be digitally connected means we need to have open and visible teaching and learning. While we love connecting with others in the cluster as well as other teachers face to face, this is not always possible. Being from a community who shares ideas and knowledge frequently, time constariants can be overcome when we use the affordances of technology. We are able to use our sites and drive to share ideas and our teaching with learners, parents and colleagues.
To successfully implement our kaupapa we must be visible.

Today I learnt about Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu. This simply means write to me, write to others. I want to explore this more in following weeks as my learners are growing in confidence in sharing their learning on their blogs. How amazing would it be for our learners to connect with other learners across the country.

Enabling Access:
Leading on from being connected, we had the opportunity to explore various sites within cluster. It was interesting to see the difference and to note how we could improve on our own sites. Dorothy took this a step further by having us share our site and provide feedback for others. It was a valuable experience as we were able to see some simple errors such as broken links, work not visible or how we have far to much information on our pages.
While I love my site and have found that it is easy for New Entrants to navigate, there were some issues with broken links. We then had the time to fix, change or include information on our sites that we deemed important or had missed doing before.

This is the landing/ home page of my site.

Having my colleagues give feedback helped me realise how I can improve on my slide decks as well as the importance of having the lens of a parent and what a parent might like to see on our class sites.
For the learners I believe my sight is appealing and allows me to respond to the diverse needs, urges and experiences I have within my class thus engaging all learners.

Learning/ AHA moments
* Remember that learners, parents and colleagues view the site.

Ramblings / Rumblings
* How can I make my set more multimodal?
* When making a site and adding to slide decks I should keep these in mind:

Teacher as Inquirer

My Inquiry Focus for this year is based on the School Entry Assessment Data. Below I have analysed the data and have noticed the lack of skills that will be required to achieve and make shift in learning across all curriculum areas. It is evident that there is a lack of basic alphabet, word and phonemic knowledge.

I have thus decided to use this information to help form my inquiry question:

If explicit strategies are explored and taught for phonics and oral language, will accelerated shift occur in other learning areas?

My initial thoughts are that if I use phonics and alphabet knowledge as a basis, could I get learners to respond to text more?

How can I transfer the social skills learnt through learning through play into thinking and sharing when explicitly teaching?

How can I interweave the gifting of language that occurs at Flying Fives more into phonics, reading and writing? 

Looking at these questions they seem more like seperate inquiry questions. I am willing and eager to track the progress of my changed practice and how they affect and help learners achieve accelerated learning. 

Alignment with the Manaiakalani Achievement Challenge:  

I am also interested in seeing if the focus on oral language helps learners share their thinking and ideas in Writing and Maths.

DFI Session 5

A day of exploring and revisiting skills that I knew but do not used regularly due to making a class site once a year.
The morning started with the importance of being visible. This is such an integral part of who we are as Manaiakalani. It reminded me of the importance of helping learners understand the difference between what we are doing and what we are learning and ensuring that there are no 'surprises'.

Doing Vs learning:
We are doing maths. We are learning to count backwards from 5 to 0 using materials.

Gerhard and Dorothy shared lots of ideas and ways we are able to make this possible in our classrooms for not only our learners but also for our wider school community and parents.
Manaiakalani schools have visibility as one of our foundation principles and we make this possible by having visible sites and visible learning. By using our Hapara dashboard, we can also provide parents access to their child's learning through the parent portal in the now (as the learner is working).

Google Class on Air is another way Manaiakalani makes teaching and the LEARN visible to other teachers i.e. colleague to colleague. I had the privilege of being accepted into 2018 Manaiakalani Google Class on Air programme but due to unforeseen circumstances could not fulfil this role. I am hoping to reapply and take up this fabulous opportunity again one day.

Today I enjoyed making sites and buttons. It was great having the time to gather content to create multimodal sites for our inquiry topic next term. I was able to link my Learning Through Play pd with the multi modal learning and multi modal literacies by thinking about my learners 'urges' and creating pages that would appeal to all the learners and provide them with the opportunity to choose how they want to learn.

The importance of planning ahead was reinforced and ensuring that the we have the intended audience in mind as we create the site. a site for  anew Entrant class would look vastly different to a site for a college student. However to extend and accelerate learners we need to ensure we have content that will enhance their learning and that they are able to access when and how they need it....not waiting on the teacher to say tell them when to watch a video clip.

This is my Space multimodal site in progress. A link to the completed site can be found here.

Learning/ AHA moments.
* Instead of creating slides for Inquiry, create an Inquiry topic multimodal site and allow learners to use the urges to Learn, Create and Share.

Ramblings/ Rumblings
* Could I assist Year 3 learners in using the site and then making an EE to create and share?

DFI Session 4

So far this has been the most valuable and time saving session we have had. I have used google sheets for data collection, to create graphs and determine trends in Maths school wide and literacy in the Junior School  Often it has taken me ages to input the same data onto different sheets i.e. NSN numbers, DOB, Ethnicity etc. A lot of time was spent on inputting this data, this time can now be spent on the analysis and discussions around the results.


What I have found invaluable:
* How to add names, nsn numbers etc from 1 sheet to another sheet.
* The beauty of the little blue box on a highlighted cell. You can start writing the days of the week and drag the blue box across cells and the rest of the cells are automatically filled in correctly.
* The down arrows on the named sheet allows you to protect or hide a sheet.




We also looked at various ways this could be used with the learners and as a reflection tool for our own learning. Below I used what I learnt to analyse a students blog posts for 2018.

When creating this graph I used the automatic fill option by pulling down the little blue box. I inserted the graph and customised. I inserted the graph into google draw and wrote my questions/thoughts/ideas around the graph. We laso learnt how to embed the sheet straight into a blog to allow the blog post to be updated immediately when the sheet is updated. This eliminates the need to fix, download and insert the graph again.

Learning /Aha moments

* In the junior school we could should use google sheets to input our data and analyse it using sparkline for each learner. I will definitely be teaching the Jnr team this. 

* WFR data can now be done in less time by filling in the more sheets that require the some of the same data.

Ramblings/ Rumblings

* How can this be used efficiently within the Junior school?

* This is an amazing rich task... what can I do to adapt and change it to meet the needs of my learners and colleagues? 

DFI, Session 3

The DFI session today was informative and also really fun!. We explored the CREATE part of the Manaiakalani pedagogy. Some google tools we used to create with today were...

Google slides
Google draw
Youtube

We also had Kent Somerville share his knowledge of creating using the drone and the many possibilities around delayed streaming, the possibilities of using the camera for film festival movies and live streaming.

I am proud to have completed my first animation using slides





I also had the opportunity to work on my digital pepeha with the help of Waha Tauhara. Thank you Waha for all your help with the pronunciation. I look forward to sharing this with you once I have learnt it.

Learnings/ AHA moments:
The quotes that Dorothy Burt shared with us really resonated with me especially as it linked back to my Learning Through Play, the Oral language acquisition and what I am hoping to achieve.

John Dewey:
“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.”

Kohl (2008) describes what creativity looks like in young children when she states, "Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas through exploration and discovery. In children, creativity develops from their experiences with the process, rather than concern for the finished product. Creativity is not to be confused with talent, skill, or intelligence. Creativity is not about doing something better than others, it is about thinking, exploring, discovering, and imagining" (Kohl, 2008).

Ramblings / Rumblings
* How can I ensure that the opportunities I provide for learners to create, exposes and assists them to learn in its fullest potential?
* How else am I able to respond to my learners needs using Create, Play and the Explain Everything app .

DFI, Session 2

Another DFI session today and lots of awesome tricks and valuable information shared to streamline working on a digital platform. Just a few of the amazing things covered in todays session are:
Learn: What this means as part of the Manaiakalani Pedagogy
Google Keep
GMAIL
Calendar
Onetab
Tobimini   and...
Hangouts/ Google meet

The pace of these sessions caters to all levels of abilities and provides opportunities to implement, try out, level up or ako ano. I absolutely love and appreciate that we have the expertise of so many knowledgeable people on hand to help and guide us through otherwise intimidating concepts. I cannot believe being on the digital journey as long as I have that I was unaware of all these streamlining options!

Below is an attempt I made with my group to use quicktime to record our hangout session. With lots of hilarious results, we managed to record our hangout session and although not perfect the potential for the use of recording ourselves and the rich discussions which occurs is HUGE!

I've already thought about how I can use this with the learners during conferencing and enabling them to use our AKO ANO. This could also be used during Team meetings when discussing our data and saved to form part of our evidence. What about the way it affords us the ability to listen and watch without being present in the room as we have so many other obligations and sometimes meeting in 1 physical space is hard.

Learning/AHA moment:
Really hard to choose this week but I think the main takeaways are:
*Google hangout and recording with quicktime
*Tobimini- quick and easy to group websites besides using bookmarks.

Ramblings/ Rumblings
* Does the team have a common understanding of LEARN?
* How can google hangout or google meet be used within a junior class setting...
* Do all things necessarily have to be used in my classroom or is using it for streamlining my workflow enough?

Teacher Appraisal PD

Today I attended the Appraisal Workshop by Dr Wendy Moore. I needed to develop my assessment for learning and leadership capability. It was an informative session that gave me lots to think about and ways to improve and streamline my current workflow.

Wendy covered:

* Conceptual framework for Appraisal

* Compliance Components

* Components of an effective appraisal system.

* Collation of evidence

I now have the tools to go away and help my colleagues in identifying the focus and ensuring we work smarter. It was also great to be able to discuss our current processes with Kiri and map out how we can move forward this year using our Teachers spiral of inquiry, our Professional blog and Appraisal documentation.

                                                 

DFI, Session 1

8 March 2019

Attending the Digital Fluency Intensive is a must for all teachers using a digital platform for teaching and learning. I learnt lots of new 'tricks' and ideas that will make learning and communicating easier with the learners and wider school community.
Having been in the cluster since 2007, it was great to be reminded of the journey thus far. It was also great to hear the ideas and pedagogy shared at Learning through Play reiterated today when Dorothy stated that:
" Deliberate acts of teaching is the fundamental element in the LEARN part of the Manaiakalani Kaupapa."

Learnings/ AHA moments

I was able to take all my learning from today and compile it into an info graphic which we also learnt how to do.
Implementation with New Entrants? ....YES!
My New Entrants could use voice typing to work on pronunciation and punctuation.
Info Graphics to share learning.

I can also see the ease of using google groups and headings and table of contents to share with my colleagues and management. Life has suddenly become a little easier.

Ramblings/ Rumblings
* Is it possible to have EE and Docs work together to help improve and accelerate my learners?
* Is their a possibility to include play based learning using some of the ideas and tricks....

Learning Through Play

4 March 2019Learning through Play

On Saturday I had the opportunity to attend the Learning through play Foundation Workshop presented by Longworth Education. It was an incredibly motivating day allowing me time for reflection and giving me a deeper understanding of the importance of play for our learners.

In response to the need for social skills and oral language learning needs, Panmure Bridge has been on this journey for a few years now. The workshop helped affirm what we have already been doing at school through our purposefully designated play classroom,  Flying Fives.  The next step on our journey was to implement play throughout the junior school classrooms while still ensuring a balance of direct intentional instruction and self directed exploration.

 

As I am taking the New Entrant class this year, I was questioning whether my current practise of pulling learners for guided sessions and doing whole class structured activities in the morning was the correct path to take. Doing play based learning in the classroom and visiting Flying Fives twice a week afforded me the opportunity to have guided explicit teaching as well as a chance to interact with the learners uninterrupted. It felt fantastic hearing them actually recommend a similar manner of running learning through play every day whole day.

Learnings/ AHA moments.
* Do away with topic and or themes...provide provocations instead.
* Authentic play develops higher cognitive and socio skills i.e. cannot be teacher driven.
* Learners are dominating the talk in play based learning and this provides lots of opportunity for vocabulary enrichment and gifting of language.


Ramblings / Rumblings:
* How can I enhance the learning through play with the use of iPads?
* Am I to focussed on the product and not focussing enough on the process (level learners are at vs learning achieved)?

School Data and WFR

This year I was really interested in hearing about our junior school data and any trends across the cluster from Rebecca Jansen and the WFR team. I wanted to use their musings as a starting point for deeper discussions within our team meetings and to help  teachers understand the importance of analysing the data as a cluster.

Taking this back to our team meetings and having a closer look at our own data gave us the spring board to ensuring we are meeting the needs of our learners, preempting any trends that may surface and sharing our collective ideas. It also gave us the opportunity to show our 2nd year BT and 1st Year BT teachers that they have worthwhile ideas and are seen as a valuable part of our team. 

Rebecca shared that Writing Vocabulary needed addressing and so we discussed how we could show this in our planning and explicitly teach it. Rebecca also noted that we were making good progress but not enough for acceleration. We further discussed effective ways and ideas that could be implemented to help achieve accelerated shift.

Learnings/ AHA moments:

* Making good progress in Writing

* Positive data for junior school and specific points of interest to focus on.

Ramblings/ Rumblings:

* How can play based learning help with accelerated shift in writing?

* How can I transfer the oral language and reading vocabulary into Writing?

Creativity vs Artistic

Another successful Teacher only day. I love how Richard is able to seamlessly transition us from relaxed holiday mode to a genuine interest into a topic that will be our focus for the year. I once again came away having not only enjoyed the day but also with some retrospection and reflection about my current practise, how I would like to continue this year and some real practical knowledge on playing with clay.

This year we got to make clay birds with Barbara. The entire staff had fun and learnt so much in the process. We were gifted words that helped us describe and talk to our peers about our birds such as smooth, grog, texture etc. It made me think more about play based learning, rich math tasks and hands on, fun activities that I could do with New Entrants and encourage throughout the junior school.

Richard also showed us how to we could get creative digitally by using www. remove.bg. I am not sure whether this would work on our iPads but I definitely can see how we could do this using Explain Everything.

Learnings/ AHA moments:
* creativity is applied imagination with innovation.
* I am not hopeless at art.
*Encourage creativity and learner outcomes may change.

Ramblings/ Rumblings:
* How much time am I allowing for creativity?
* Am I using creativity, rich tasks, hands on activities to their full potential?
* How can we tap into learners cultural knowledge, strengths and interests using this platform?