The Oral Narrative Task - assessing vocabulary and comprehension through the Better Start Literacy Approach.

 So, with all this focus on phonological awareness, I find myself asking 'How can I still assess vocabulary development and comprehension through the BSLA programme?'

The answer seems to be the Oral Narrative Task!

The Year 3's are given the story: A Mystery to Solve. 

They listen to the narrator tell the story, page by page, while they get to see the pictures. There is no text to read. Then, on completion of the story, it is their turn to retell what happened, page by page, with the pictures to use as prompts to guide their retell. There are some more traditional comprehension questions to conclude the assessment task.

I have been so concerned with getting my teaching up and running that this assessment task (which provides valuable insights but does not directly affect groupings,) has been put on the back burner. Now that I am getting underway with it however, I am excited about the data I am gathering and the ability to hear back what the children have said. You really get a feel for their confidence and ability at the task. I am finding myself surprised by the results of a few who I thought would be more confident and others who I thought would've been less confident.

I'm going to relook at who my target students are based on this data as I believe there are students who I previously thought were stronger at this than they are proving to be.

Here is an example of the data I can gather from this task:

This is of course a summary of the retell, but it is an easy way to compare between children and look for gaps! I also have access to the comprehension questions and answers as well as a transcript of this student's retell.

I look forward to collating this information when all assessments are done, and planning how to address these gaps purposefully - probably in their independent tasks but also in the whole class Storybook teaching, for next term.

BSLA - What is it and how is it different?

 So, I've begun my study through the University of Canterbury; doing a micro-credential in the Better Start Literacy Approach, or BSLA. There is a lot to get my head around before I can even begin this new way of teaching my reading class. 

As I have a Year 3 group of learners, they begin with a Year 3 Spelling Screener. This checks their phonological awareness skills. While a small group of learners showed they needed to move up to a harder assessment task, the majority of my Reading class needed to be tested down on the Year 2 Spelling Screener - which has a combination of real words and made up words. 

The Year 3 Spelling Screener -
you can see the different levelling of target sounds here.

The Non-Words tested in the Year 2 Spelling Screener.

I was looking for two things - which Taumata (or level) best fits my whole class for the whole class teaching element, and which level is their best fit for their small group instruction. Based on their individual results they then were tested on Non-Word Reading and Non-Word Spelling tests to find the level to begin their small group instruction on.

This has been a lot to get my head around and has really drawn my focus away from any vocabulary and comprehension (you can't even bring this into it when dealing with Non-Words!) but I do see the value in doing these assessments. 

I look forward to beginning my instruction properly to see how I feel once the lessons have been implemented. The nice thing is once the levels are decided on, the planning is all done for me and I just follow through the lesson plans with a bit of Teacher Judgement to assist with the pacing of their learning.

Term 3 - My Action Plan

After the latest CoL meeting I have come away with one key question: "What am I doing differently and how can I share and show this?"

I am being more purposeful in teaching the new words in our texts and drawing the children's attention to these new words. I feel like this is starting to get through to them, while still planning for some fun and engaging activities. I have been using the StoryWorld collection of connected texts which helps to aid purpose for why we are reading our more tricky texts, and the children seem to enjoy these.

I am pleased with this example of purposeful vocabulary learning from this week. She didn't fully understand the whole meaning of these words by the end, but in thinking about them and trying to explain them in her own words I think more authentic learning took place than if I just gave her definitions to learn:

What's more, I could see she was really proud of herself and enjoyed her learning this week!

I'm doing a BSLA micro-credential through the University of Canterbury this term, so I am juggling the Structured Literacy learning with my ideas for comprehension and vocabulary development in my more capable readers. It should be an interesting term!