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?

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?

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?