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?