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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
