End of Year Reflection - 2020. What a year it's been!

 Well, on top of everything else, I dislocated my knee almost as soon as we got back to school again, and was pretty much off for the remainder of Term 3! 

Term 4 has been crazy busy with testing, reports and art exhibitions, so I am finally finding the time to look back on how this year has gone.

I am so pleased with the progress that our children have made in Reading across the team this year! Despite a year of many challenges, we were not disappointed by any of our Reading results, in fact we had quite a few children whose results pleasantly surprised us! 

Looking forward to 2021, I can see that my team could benefit from some professional development around knowing when to progress students further, as we had a few children reading in their instructional groups at too low a level. Mrs Wilson noticed, some of these children only required a little more wait time from the teacher in order to show they knew or could work out the word in the text.

Here is an update showing the progress made by my target students in the second half of this very challenging year. I couldn't be more proud of them!

Inquiry Group
Name	EOY 2019 Reading Level	Current Instructional Level	End of Year Testing Result!
H	9	14	22
P	11	14	18
T	10	14	18
M	7	14	16
E	10	14	19
K	12	14	20

Maybe next year I will be able to Inquire more into my Maths programme as I had originally intended to do this year!

Reflections on Distance Teaching and Learning

 We had our Manaiakalani Staff Meeting with Dorothy Burt today. We were asked to reflect on how we incorporated Learn-Create-Share in our distance teaching.

Heidi Davis and I came up with the following thoughts:

Distance Learning Again!

 I thought it might be worth a short blog post to share how we've attempted to best teach Reading, trying to maintain some progress for our students in a distanced learning / 'Bubble School' world.

Here are some resources that my team has put together:

Back to School for Level 2...

We are back at school and there has been a shift in our School's PLD focus to Reading. Therefore the direction of my professional Inquiry is changing again. I am proud of the way my team adapted to the challenges of going into lockdown and the resources we produced for the children on our site. I look forward to getting back to ‘business as usual’ with a focus on my Reading Programme.

I have taken on more of our able, high-achieving readers from within the team, but still have a group of mostly Year 3s, stuck at the end of Green. I really feel that with a push from me, they have the potential to progress much closer to the desired 8 years reading age by the end of this year. 

My Inquiry Focus question has become: 

How can I lift student achievement and fluency in Reading, to progress hesitant readers from a Reading Age of 6 years, to 8 years?

In our staff meeting this week, we have been asked to go away and identify what our learners are doing when they come to an unknown word. Here is what I have found.

Name	EOY 2019 Reading Level	Current Instructional Level	Observation of reading strategies
H	9	14	? Haven't had the chance to observe due to absences.
P	11	14	Decoding, breaking words into chunks of sound, quite successfully.
T	10	14	Combination of decoding chunks, echoing others and appealing.
M	7	14	Decoding, breaking words into chunks of sound, quite successfully.
E	10	14	Appeals
K	12	14	Appeals? / Waits for others and echoes.

I have found this process useful, as it is keeping me mindful to particularly work on providing other independent strategies to the children dependent on echoing others or appealing.

I am looking forward to working closely with this group, reading with them on a daily basis as much as I can, to see if we can supercharge their learning!

Term 2, 2020! So Much Has Changed...

Well, Term 1 went in a very different direction than what I was anticipating in my last blog post!

 I was awaiting my first professional conversation around the direction to take my Maths Inquiry in, when we went into Lockdown in Term 1.

My Inquiry has now taken a different path as we have had to navigate the challenges of delivering distance learning to Year 2s and 3s. As Team Leader I've put my energy into designing a distance learning programme that would engage children in their home situations, enough that they would return to our site each day, with tasks that are achievable in a home setting and yet not too easy. 

I am proud of the open-ended tasks that we have designed during this time and the creative and individual results that were produced by our students. 

My Inquiry Question for now is: 

How can I provide accessible, achievable, engaging and rich tasks to our learners in their home environment?

Here is a link to our home learning which we are archiving as we go.

Here is some of my favourite content - as found on my Class On Air site, which is not Reading/Writing/Maths related, but was a lot of fun and put some smiles on many faces during this difficult time!

My Inquiry for 2020!

I am still a little unsure of quite how to tackle this, and am looking forward to meeting with my colleagues to discuss the best approach, but I am thinking that my Inquiry for this year will look at developing a successful Maths programme in my own class, that I can then bring to my team and we can continue to develop together. 

 I am interested in how best to incorporate the professional learning we have had in Mathematics through the DMiC PLD over the last two years, with the more prescriptive approach through using the NZC Mathematics Books as a resource throughout the school this year. I would like to try to balance the two approaches, so as to ensure full and appropriate curriculum coverage while still giving children the rich discussion and problem solving approach. 

 So, currently, my Inquiry focus question is: How can I use purposeful teaching of mathematical language to raise the achievement of my learners in Mathematics? But I am aware this doesn't quite cover the full scope of what I would like to do...

I have signed up to join a Maths Leadership Made Easy course, with Jo Knox and Marie Hirst, which I am hoping will provide me with a little more direction.