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!