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.

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!

End of Term Evaluation of my Priority Learners - Where to Next?

So, it has been a semi successful, busy and challenging term for me. After doing running records and writing reports, I am happy with how most of the class are tracking. There are definitely still some challenges and gaps for me to address in the second half of this year however. As a point of comparison to term 1, I have looked through the task completion and blogging efforts of my priority learners in Term 2:

I am not yet getting that higher level thinking that I am hoping for in their independent tasks. More concerningly however, I seem to have children who have not uploaded or blogged the majority of their work from the term? This could be mistakes in their filing but perhaps also regular absences on Fridays when we focus on completing our work properly. I feel like task completion on the whole has improved but it is not translating into saved work in their Drives and quality is yet to follow suit. I think having my Reading class not be comprised entirely of my home class is playing a part. I am unable to invest the time into finishing their tasks off at the end of the week that I give to my own class, and their home teacher is less aware of the expectations I have on them. If I spend more of my teaching time on this however, I quickly run out of teaching time to spend on my six reading groups. It's a hard balance to strike.

From my Running Record assessments, comprehension seems to be very hit and miss with most of my priority learners. I think there is a lot to be said for the context of the book they are reading and how familiar they already are with the vocabulary and prior knowledge understanding required for the text. There is also very much a reluctance to talk and discuss the text from some, as well as some surprising knowledge gaps - such as reading to the end of a sentence, using punctuation appropriately.

My big idea of assessing vocabulary output in their independent tasks has fallen short. The final week of term seems to have greatly reduced attendance - especially come the end of the week, so I think next term, instead of assessing the children in weeks 5 and 10, I'll try weeks 4 and 9. Attendance in general has been challenging for me. In a term of regular illnesses, it's not only the significant absences from school of the children in my class but my own absences while looking after my young family that are affecting my ability to see through my best laid plans. Here's hoping next term is kinder!

Putting the fun back into Reading with Drama!

 I have been talking about lifting achievement through an engagement lens and as our Inquiry this term was a Drama unit, I have had the perfect opportunity to dive into performing plays with my class.

Here is a glimpse of what we got up to, that we made for our school news - PENN.