First CoL Meeting of 2025

We had our first CoL meeting of the year today at Panmure Bridge School.

As we move into the first year of implementing a Structured Maths programme (or two!) into Pt England School, I have been mindful of the Manaiakalani kaupapa of Learn-Create-Share. How can we continue to implement this when following structured learning progressions, and a predetermined scope and sequence - particularly when considering programmes like Pr1me Mathematics, which are presented in textbook after textbook formats.

The CREATE seems a particular challenge to me - requiring a creative teacher to provide students with their own opportunities to create. 

So I am thinking of inquiring into my teaching practice with CREATE in mind.

On the 29th of January, our whole teaching staff had PD about the new Mathematics Curriculum in New Zealand. Something that resonated with me during this day, was the recurring language around the importance of Pattern Recognition.

Perhaps this can be a focus for CREATE tasks... and the direction for my Inquiry this year? 

In the meantime testing week is coming up! I am very interested to see where my data leads me...

2025 and Structured Mathematics!

Well it is a new year and I am fortunate enough to be reappointed as a CoL teacher in 2025. This year presents the opportunity for many Professional Learning insights as I continue to embed my BSLA learnings into my teaching practice, as New Zealand embarks on Structured Literacy programmes throughout the country. I am looking forward to the opportunity to follow this approach for a whole school year. It will be interesting to gauge the progress made over this time, while keeping in mind the need for focussed vocabulary and comprehension building. 

So, where to for 2025? It is very much as case of watch this space! 

Mathematics is the area in which I am going to need to invest the bulk of my time. We are diving into Structured Mathematics, with my school having picked up two programmes; one with a more Junior school, hands on manipulatives focus, and the other for Years 4 - 8, with textbooks and online content. As a teacher of Years 3 and 4 this year, I straddle the two levels and will need to gain a solid understanding of the planning and implementation of both programmes; Numicon and Pr1me.

My Burst!

 Here is a video of my presentation for Bursts and Bubbles at Panmure Bridge School. It was a very interesting afternoon and I very much enjoyed hearing my colleagues progress with their inquiries.

Bursts and Bubbles!

 

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!

Term 3 Reflection

 I am now in my fourth week of implementing the Better Start Literacy Approach and I am happy to report that I am seeing the value it brings to the classroom. The children seem much more confident at tackling unknown words and I have been encouraged through the comprehensive planning provided, to be more ambitious and talk about things like Suffixes and Prefixes, Third Person, Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives.

We are retelling our whole class storybook each week and referring to the Story Elements of Character, Setting, Problem, Plan, Actions and Ending, and have begun unpacking the characters' feelings as they change throughout the story.

It has been a challenge in many ways. Timetabling has been one as with such a large whole class element before even getting into small group teaching, Reading now takes 90 minutes per day (although Writing is incorporated within this too). As we cross-group between our two Year 3 classes for Reading (and not Writing) this has been something to be mindful of!

I have enjoyed seeing what seems like significant progress in both the attempts at reading unknown words and attempts at spelling words the children have never spelt before. The word chain element of the whole class teaching and the segmentation and blending of the sounds in words has paid dividends here I think. It has been noticeable in one of my groups in particular, that has a child who had just begun reading at Green on the colour wheel, grouped with a child who was reading at Emerald (that's a 3 year difference in Reading Ages traditionally speaking)! They are both getting value out of the same small group instruction, as the traditionally 'lower' reader is very strong in phonics knowledge, while the 'higher' reader (who is also ESOL) has a lot of confused sounds - particularly when it comes to vowel knowledge. 

Now that I am in the swing of things with my classroom programme, I look forward to compiling my Oral Narrative data over the school holidays and planning to purposefully teach to the gaps in vocabulary and comprehension - hopefully with some exciting independent tasks. Although I am mindful Term 4 will be full of distractions like Swimming, Testing, Athletics and Report writing.

Here is an example of some of what we have been doing independently:

Designing Engaging Independent Learning Activities - with a BSLA focus

 Looking back on my Inquiry question from the beginning of the year, it was very important to me that the children are engaged in learning when working independently at their desks. This requires tasks that they are interested in completing and see value in.

I have started to create some follow up activities on EE for the children to work on on their iPads, that use the resources from the BSLA programme. 

I am happy to see good engagement with these activities and the children seem to enjoy completing them.

Here is a student's blog post that shows some of what they have been doing.

Today I did some EE with my friends so hard that we had to think about it and listening to Mrs Walker‘s words it was very funny that we got to do some work and it was a very fun.

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.