Wrapping up 2019 and looking forward to 2020!

This year, I have felt my focus pulled in various directions as things have occurred in my space throughout the year.

I am really proud of the way we, as a team, worked on our knowledge of Reading Groups' instruction. We had regular conversations around the progress of all of our students and discussed ways in which we could next target their learning to achieve shift up the levels. While progress was not the same for every student, there were some very pleasing results on the whole, as well as more knowledge and reflective practice occurring within the team.

Looking forward to 2020, I would like to attempt a similar focus on Writing within our team meetings. I feel like of all the subjects, it is the one that we are probably least on the same page about. It would be good to discuss ideas, strategies and expectations appropriate to our Year 2 learners throughout next year. Hopefully we can implement more of what Dr Jannie van Hees was modelling for us in 2019.

I am particularly interested in exploring the implementation of the Engage programme, particularly as it relates to building the 'Thinking' skill in our children. I feel like this is a skill that could be utilised across all subjects of the curriculum.

Engaging in New Directions

While encouraged by the gains my students are making in Reading, I find myself inquiring in new directions. My team have been fortunate to host Dr Jannie Van Hees in our space for two sessions this term. She has guided us through ways in which to enrich our students' writing and encourage them to become quality authors who write the detail. So this area will, undoubtedly, be an area in which I direct a lot of effort in the term to come.

 I also, was lucky enough to attend a Professional Development session on ENGAGE. This programme aims to grow students' capabilities at managing themselves through co-operative games in three learning areas: Feeling, Thinking and Doing. Through playing these games in meaningful ways, supported with purposeful language, for 30 minutes each day over 10 weeks, children have been seen to make significant gains in their abilities to manage themselves and problem solve. I was intrigued by the (anecdotal) data I collected on my students while reflecting on their abilities in my meeting. I will include a screenshot of this to explain my thinking further:

This is a snapshot of how well I feel my students are performing in the areas labelled above. 

I found it intriguing how many children I marked as merely 'emerging' in the realm of 'Thinking' skills. Before recording these levels, I had expected that the behavioural and emotional challenges would probably prove greater than the thinking. This result however, suggests that perhaps I am already aware, and already provide much necessary guidance in the emotional and behavioural realms and need to work further on helping students to gain skills in remembering instructions and blocking out distractions as well as some fine and gross motor skill improvements.

By engaging in this programme for Term 4, I hope to see some real positive change, particularly in students abilities to remember multiple step instructons!

Term 3 Inquiry Update

I am really enjoying aligning my literacy teaching with our Science: The Living World, Inquiry topic for this term.

I was surprised, early on in the term by how many, what I had assumed 'basic' words, were missing from a large number of my students' vocabularies. I was wondering how to teach concepts about habitats, adaptation and camouflage, while realising most of my class didn't know the word 'beak'.

I have really endeavoured to read aloud to my class on a daily basis. Now that my students are in a good routine, there is enough time to really dig deep into understanding a shared text, which I feel has been beneficial to developing vocabulary knowledge around our topic.

Having put a lot of effort with my lower groups into differentiating the vowel sounds and applying this to our sounding out, I am realising that a lot of my higher level readers still have gaps in this area. So, this is an area of ongoing work.

Going forward, I want to focus the children on awareness of audience when reading and writing. I would like to encourage more 'reading to' by the students themselves. This may take shape in little self-directed video clips... I'll keep you posted!

My Inquiry so far...

I have been continuing to focus on my deliberate acts of teaching at reading time this term. Inspired by Helen Squires' inquiry conversations I have focused on explicitly teaching vowel sounds in my class, which has evolved into reading and writing simple consonant-vowel-consonant three letter words. The children seem to be enjoying this and I sense the occurrence of quite a few 'aha' moments as the children start to click and see the patterns of sound in these words.

I have also endeavoured to 'read to' my class more frequently and delve in depth into texts, allowing more of a personal response from the class, and the chance for them to extend their vocabulary and explore the potential of using these words themselves in their iPad recordings.

One of my Magenta readers, with incomplete alphabet knowledge and a huge reliance on copying teacher writing, did exceptionally well at recording his ideas on creating a new Gruffalo story last week:



I will continue to further extend on these ideas for the remainder of this term.

My 2019 Inquiry - One Month In!

It has only been a few weeks since I began to narrow the focus of my Inquiry down to Reading. This has been a great time in which to get to grips with my re-grouped Reading Groups and their particular skills and needs. Unfortunately, this has also been a time of great upheaval to our regular timetable, with activities such as swimming and meetings impacting on my face to face time with my readers.

However, I have had the chance to enjoy the input of Helen Squires in my classroom, modelling how to implement Gwenneth Philips prompts as well as the follow-up word work that she has so often spoken of. I feel the small steps I have made to implement this teaching strategy are paying off, but there is still much work to do!

In the meantime, I am enjoying extending my Gold group of readers by going deep into learning areas as well as exposing them to more of a breadth of text. This week we will be learning and performing a play, which I am excited about.

I am still keen to have a buddy/mentorship programme between the children in my class, but have held off from implementing this as, with a new group of students in my class, I felt they needed time to settle in to my routines and expectations for their own learning first.

With all this in mind, I want to keep a lens on the inclusion of vocabulary building activities in my lessons. I look forward to gaining more inspiration in this department when I am on holiday soon and have the chance to read my new book 'What Every Primary School Teacher Should Know About Vocabulary', by Jannie van Hees and Paul Nation.

I am also very much looking forward to ideas and inspiration from meeting with the rest of my Inquiry group at tomorrow's staff meeting.

My Inquiry for 2019.

I am starting to put together the beginnings of my Inquiry for 2019.


 I met with my Inquiry group at our staff meeting yesterday afternoon and they have helped me decide on a starting point. I have struggled to narrow down my area of focus for this year as there is so much I can see that would be great to work on.

For now, it looks like I will inquire into "How can I raise the achievement of my students in Reading?" 

I am just beginning work with new groups for Reading this week, as we have just started cross-grouping within our space. I have two groups of three on Magenta, a group on the cusp of Red/Yellow, another group on Blue and a group of very capable Gold readers. I am thinking about how I can best make this combination work to my advantage. So I think I will begin by trialling a buddy system between my Gold and Magenta readers. The Gold readers can listen and assist with the Magentas re-reading their texts, and the Magenta readers can listen to the Gold readers practice reading to an audience.

I am keen to focus on my use of the Gwenneth Philips prompts that we have been receiving PD on in the school, particularly with my Magenta groups. I am also going to look carefully at my use of follow-up activities, to ensure they are truly targeting the students' needs. My very emergent group n particular could do with some tactile experiences to build their alphabet knowledge.

As I am also in a Manaiakalani-Google Class OnAir position this year, I will utilise the tool of videoing my lessons to see what discoveries I can make, about my teaching and the children's learning. I look forward to trying out a few different approaches and see where I am and how I'm feeling about it all at the end of the term!