Sheena Cameron Reading

 

Panmure Bridge School along with Glen Taylor School joined to have a Reading professional development day. Leading the day was Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey. 

Some key points and highlights:

Link to maths with Talk Moves

Link to phonics with Yolanda Sorryl

Ideas shared around how to do daily Shared Reading

Good shared reading alleviates the anxiety around guided reading.

What was reaffirmed and resonated with me especially as this is something we have previously discussed in our junior school team meetings:

* No round robin

* reading within a colour band

* Digital modelling books to refer back to -rewindable learning / Ako Ano

* Good universal LI's for Ako Ano and follow up activities.

* importance of multiple opportunities to read

*Big Book/ Shared Book

This also linked really well with HLP's 

Interesting - No modelling book in NE - I think by having a digital modelling book where the learners can hear and see cancels out this theory.

Principals Trip to Christchurch

 The ever changing face of  learning environment pedagogy and the redevelopment of the Tamaki area has led to the Manaiakalani cluster principals making a trip down to Christchurch in order to see  how schools have rebuilt after the devastating Christchurch earthquakes. We were able to see some amazing building with sound pedagogy and research invested into making these learning environments sustainable and meet the needs of the school community.

The schools we visited were Rawhiti School, Marshland school and Rolleston College.

Some key ideas I liked:

School cultural narrative

Assembly areas within a hub

library areas within a hub

A seperate whare for kapahaka and a meeting room

Dedicated are for headphones

coloured boxes for reading books

Climbing rocks

Hobbit hill and slide

Bike trail

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.

 

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 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 .

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)?

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?