Bursts and Bubbles is coming up this week at Panmure Bridge School and I have been thinking hard about what I have that is ready to share.
The change in my teaching practice in Reading this year has been huge. There has been a significant shift in how I teach; not only in the allocation of time to various aspects of the lesson - such as a much larger emphasis on a shared story book and whole class phonemic awareness, but also in the (reduced) complexity of the texts that I share in my small, guided reading sessions.
So my initial Inquiry question "Will a purposeful focus on vocabulary development and task engagement lift comprehension achievement in my Year 3 readers?" while still being something I am very interested in, had to be put to the side for a time as I focussed my attention on completing the requirements for the Better Start Literacy Approach micro-credential, through the University of Canterbury.
In following the pre-prepared scope and sequence of the BSLA lesson plans, I couldn't often put task engagement and vocabulary development at the forefront of my mind. However, I have endeavoured to include it as and when I can. This tends to happen more easily when discussing the shared story book of the week.
BSLA provides a list of recommended storybooks that are appropriate for discussing the Story Elements of 'Character-Setting-Problem-Plan-Actions and Ending'. They also come with 6 vocabulary building focus words, pre-selected and defined, to be shared with the class each week - 4 in English and 2 in Maori. In many ways, I think the children in my Reading class, enjoy the formulaic and repetitive structure to the BSLA lessons. They know there will be specific words in the stories each week that we will be focussing on and discussing. They know that we will be retelling the story through the Story Elements structure. And they know that we will be practising our 'phoneme manipulation' through a Word Chain activity, which they can see themselves getting better at week in and week out. Surprisingly, I find this to be engaging them a lot more than I expected. Perhaps it is the quick fire nature of seeing themselves achieve, or if they make a mistake being able to quickly fix it and learn from it, that they enjoy, but engagement doesn't seem to be too much of a problem.
Similarly in the small reading group sessions, when doing word work, making and breaking words with our focus sounds in them, I am seeing high engagement in what can feel like a repetitive process. The learning is evident and tangible in these sessions however, and I think this is where the success lies.
So onto assessment. I am struggling to assess the progress in my students' retell, comprehension and vocabulary with much in the way of hard data, at least at this stage in the year. (BSLA assessments require me to have completed a 10 week block of teaching and I am currently in Week 8.) But I have plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest significant gains have been made, in many if not all children's learning.
But let's look at what I do have:
STAR Reading Data for my target students would suggest Vocabulary building has been somewhat of a success. (Remember the low Vocabulary scores in particular helped to form my Inquiry Question in Term 1.)
Here is a collection of their progress graphs from February to November, across all four parts of the STAR test.
I am particularly excited about the progress evident in the most central graph. I won't take all the credit for this as this is a student who loves to go to the library and read in their own time, but I am very proud of her. Her vocabulary score has increased from 6/10 in February to 9/10 in November. Overall my target students improved by an average of 20% more on their Vocabulary scores at then end of the year.
Here are some graphs that show the breakdown of the three comprehension elements I am most interested in from the STAR: Sentence Comprehension, Paragraph Comprehension and Vocabulary.
Watch this space - I am excited to gather more evidence and data to assess the effectiveness of my Inquiry in 2024 and further inform where I may want to go looking ahead to 2025!
