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.