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?

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.

 

Tapasa

Tapasa is a cultural competency framework for teachers of pacific children. Some important aspects that I have learnt through this PD run by Jeremy:

The Va - the sacred connection between people. Love, Service, family and spirituality.

Jeremy suggested we use this language with parents: The Va : I want to establish the va with you OR the purpose of this meeting is to establish the va. In Samoan can you also say Tauhi va.

Tapasa is all about:

* Cultural confidence

* Connections

* Culture

* Consistency

* Collaboration / collabor action.

My goal is to use this language more with Pacific Island families. 

 

Maths PLD

Today was my first day of having to work with a facilitator and the principal in outlining a plan to implement a professional development plan for the school. The process helped me focus on what I believe the fundamental ideas and foundations in Maths are that will help our learners achieve accelerated shift as well as improve and develop a positive attitude towards mathematics for both teachers and learners. 

This reaffirmed the importance of building strong relationships and knowing, in this case, the staff as well as our learners. The right fit, the right product, the right motivation, the right balance. I look forward to not only working closely with Marie Hirst but also learning from her.

 

New role, new teacher

This term sees me stepping away from the classroom and supporting an experienced teacher, new to New Zealand in navigating the New Zealand curriculum and embrace the Manaiakalani Cluster pedagogy of Learn, Create and Share. 

Balancing learning to get to know the curriculum as well as assisting with learning how to use technology on a daily basis is not an easy task. My main focus is to show the important must know items first. This is to ensure that daily communication and administration can be completed and everyone is always in the know about what is happening. I will also be working through the the google educator certification with the new to NZ teacher. 

        

DFI session 6

Todays session was facilitated by Dorothy and focussed on Enabling Access and being Connected.

Connected: To be digitally connected means we need to have open and visible teaching and learning. While we love connecting with others in the cluster as well as other teachers face to face, this is not always possible. Being from a community who shares ideas and knowledge frequently, time constariants can be overcome when we use the affordances of technology. We are able to use our sites and drive to share ideas and our teaching with learners, parents and colleagues.
To successfully implement our kaupapa we must be visible.

Today I learnt about Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu. This simply means write to me, write to others. I want to explore this more in following weeks as my learners are growing in confidence in sharing their learning on their blogs. How amazing would it be for our learners to connect with other learners across the country.

Enabling Access:
Leading on from being connected, we had the opportunity to explore various sites within cluster. It was interesting to see the difference and to note how we could improve on our own sites. Dorothy took this a step further by having us share our site and provide feedback for others. It was a valuable experience as we were able to see some simple errors such as broken links, work not visible or how we have far to much information on our pages.
While I love my site and have found that it is easy for New Entrants to navigate, there were some issues with broken links. We then had the time to fix, change or include information on our sites that we deemed important or had missed doing before.

This is the landing/ home page of my site.

Having my colleagues give feedback helped me realise how I can improve on my slide decks as well as the importance of having the lens of a parent and what a parent might like to see on our class sites.
For the learners I believe my sight is appealing and allows me to respond to the diverse needs, urges and experiences I have within my class thus engaging all learners.

Learning/ AHA moments
* Remember that learners, parents and colleagues view the site.

Ramblings / Rumblings
* How can I make my set more multimodal?
* When making a site and adding to slide decks I should keep these in mind: