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?