My Burst!

 I have had the privilege of presenting my findings this afternoon at the Kahui Ako Bursts and Bubbles held at the Panmure Yacht Club. Here is my speech, summarising my Inquiry thus far. 

Priority Leaners and their Data!

It is a really exciting time when the test results start coming in! While marking and compiling Numicon Milestones can take a lot of time, PAT results and the Pr1me Placement Test have given me some reassurance that good learning progress has been made in my class this year. I have collected data for my 'priority learners' group to share with you here:

I can also report very pleasing results across all levels within my class. It is interesting to consider the anomalies however - children who perform well in PATs but not in the Pr1me Placement Test or vice versa, as well as the two students I have (not in the priority group), who appear to have actually dropped a little in their learning. Although I have ideas as to why this may be. 

Numicon Milestone results will be shared in time. Although it is important to note, there isn't really any BOY or pre-test data to compare them to.

End of Term 3 Update!

 It has been a very busy term, and I'll have to admit there have been distractions from my Inquiry! I have managed to film my Manaiakalani Film Festival movie, and have had a full week off with the flu - which could have easily been longer as I struggled through the last week of term with little to no voice! This, as well as students' own absences, has affected my ability to implement my planned EEs each Friday with student voice coming through. However, anecdotally, I feel good progress and focus on Mathematical language is still being made. There is just less consistent data to prove it.

It will be interesting looking ahead to testing early on next term, to see what the results have to say!

An example of some of our learning from this term!

Vosaic Recording - August: The Language of Equals.

 As directed by the Senior Management Team at our school, we have been recording snapshots of our teaching using Vosaic. 

In my video this term, I am instructing my group of learners in understanding the equals sign as meaning that both sides are 'balanced' - and relating that to the scales they see in front of me. They need to complete the given equations, by filling in the empty number box to make both sides 'balanced'.

There is a lot of language that is being unpacked in this session. So I asked the AI tool in Vosaic to assess me on my use of language, particularly the clarity with which I explain it, and the opportunities for the children to use it themselves. My prompt was "How well does the teacher explain the mathematical language and provide opportunities for the students to use it themselves in this lesson?"

Here is the feedback that I received:

Teacher's Explanation of Mathematical Language

The teacher effectively introduces and explains mathematical language throughout the lesson. For

instance, the teacher begins by discussing the concept of balance in equations, stating, "If it's the same

on each side, we can say that the equation is... that's balanced" This sets a clear foundation for understanding equality in mathematical terms.

Additionally, the teacher emphasizes the term "empty box" to represent a missing number in equations.

The teacher states, "the empty box means a number is missing", which helps students grasp the concept of variables in equations. This terminology is reinforced when the teacher asks students to identify the missing number in their equations, encouraging them to use the language actively.

Opportunities for Student Engagement

The lesson provides multiple opportunities for students to engage with the mathematical language. For

example:

• The teacher prompts students to write equations based on a word problem, asking, "Could you

write an equation for me?" (01:47 → -01:49 → ). This encourages students to apply their

understanding of the language in a practical context.

• Students are asked to share their equations, with the teacher facilitating discussion by asking, "Do

you agree?" (03:26 →

This not only reinforces their understanding but also allows them to articulate their reasoning.

• During the activity with shapes, the teacher instructs students to create their own equations using

the missing number box, stating, "I want to see missing number boxes" (10:20 → -10:21 →

This hands-on approach allows students to practice the language in a collaborative setting.

Overall, the teacher's clear explanations and structured opportunities for student participation effectively

promote the use of mathematical language in the lesson.

Research indicates that using precise mathematical language and providing opportunities for students to

engage with it can enhance their understanding and retention of mathematical concepts (Hattie, 2009).

Engaging students in discussions about their reasoning also fosters deeper learning and critical thinking

skills (Cohen, 1994).

Term 3 - Intervention Implementation!

We had our CoL meeting this afternoon at Panmure Bridge School. It was a really nice chance to share our Inquiries and korero around the challenges we are facing and where to from here?

I enjoyed sharing my Inquiry from 2024 with a colleague who is just starting out on her BSLA learning journey and questioning, as I did last year, how to push comprehension when you have to focus so heavily on phonemic awareness.

But, back to 2025 and Mathematics!

I have had time over the school holidays, and while observing my class under a student teachers' full control, to consider how best to implement my Inquiry intervention, while following a structured mathematics programme (in this case Numicon). 

While writing the students' report comments and talking about our focus in Mathematics with the parents at our Parent-Teacher conferences last term, it really does come back to understanding our concepts through the language of mathematics. I have been thinking this language over, while hearing senior management talk about learning intentions being understood by our students and in 'kid-friendly speak', I am intentionally teaching some more complicated language to the children so that while some of my learning intentions might not appear to be 'kid-friendly', we have in fact unpacked them as a class so that they should be able to explain what they are learning if and when asked. Exposing them to higher level vocabulary can only be a good thing surely?

Anyway, what is my intervention, and is it regular and measureable?

I am trying to balance the juggling act of all the must do's, supposed to do's and nice to do's, and this is only looking at the subject of mathematics! Numicon comes with Assessments called Milestones. I know from conversations with my colleagues that when we first looked at doing these in our school, they appeared quite overwhelming - it is impossible to do them on every student, on a one on one basis within a testing week. They are ongoing teaching and learning check-ins as units are taught.

With this in mind, I am designing tasks within Explain Everything, that are to happen on a Friday, within which students are assessed on the appropriate milestones for the week, while being required to record their voice using and explaining the target vocabulary and big idea learning from that week. 

Staying on top of implementing these - and training the children up! - is going to be my big challenge for the term. Children away on Friday's for instance will need to be given a catch up time - possibly before school in the morning or in some of my release. Therefore I need to keep these tasks short and sweet while targeting the key learning effectively.

Stay posted for how this plays out over the course of this term!

This is 1 of 7 pages of Milestone Checks for a Year 3.
It can seem quite an overwhelming assessment tool to implement effectively!

Reflecting on Engagement and Language Use in Mathematics

 It was our turn for the school news today, and I thought it was a really good opportunity for student voice to tell me how they felt about our new Maths programme this year. You can check out our video on our class blog here. 

I have children who really do struggle to tune into learning but have latched on to the Numicon resources. The overwhelming response from the children in my class in that they love Maths this year.

At the same time as creating my news item, I have student teacher in my classroom on full control. She is following the Numicon lesson plans as I have instructed her to, mindfully incorporating the target Maths vocabulary. It is really nice to sit back and watch the children build in confidence at understanding and then using themselves, the new vocabulary from each lesson. You can see the vocabulary features heavily alongside images of our learning, on our Maths group slides each week.

I will be on leave for much of the remainder of this term for family reasons. But I am thinking ahead to Term 3 and how to implement purposeful learning reflections to encourage target vocabulary use. I look forward to trying these ideas out in a fresh, new term!

Numicon Assessments!

 It has been really interesting undergoing the Numicon Milestone Assessment checks in the build up to report writing. There are a lot of gaps in the ‘higher level’ students’ mathematical understanding and concepts - such as using tens and ones to count large numbers quickly and accurately. I am really enjoying teaching using the Numicon programme now and can see the need for the deliberate teaching of vocabulary around such basic concepts as addition and subtraction. I am mindful of progressing towards the Pr1me programme as an end goal, but am currently just enjoying embedding Numicon in the classroom and making sure it is done to the best of my ability. As we started a term behind, I am also mindful of moving through the lessons at a brisk pace, to cover as much of the content before the year ends as I can - while maintaining understanding of the learning for the children. What has been reassuring for me, is that I am not ‘babying’ the learning for my top achievers. There are so many fundamental gaps in their knowledge base that I am actually really happy I didn’t put them on a separate Pr1me journey, although that could become a pathway I am open to later in the year.

A Snapshot of my Milestone Tracking Sheet so far!

Numicon in Room 13: 'Getting Started' before the Holidays!

 So, we are heading into the Term 1 Holidays, and I have only just finished the 'Getting Started' section of the Year 3 Numicon Planning. It is going to be interesting to see how much coverage of the programme I can complete before the end of the year, as I feel like I am already a term behind!

So far, I have to say I am enjoying teaching Numicon Maths. There is a clear purpose to each lesson and the materials relate well to the concepts being taught. At times, I am finding myself under prepared, because there are activities that require printing, cutting and laminating in advance, and if you don't read ahead carefully enough, this can catch you off guard.

The children are definitely engaged and enjoying discovering a 'new' way of learning Maths. I look forward to getting through some more areas of the curriculum over Term 2, and seeing how well their Number Knowledge sticks. There will be milestone assessments coming up, which I am looking forward to doing, as I feel they will be of more use than the traditional JAM assessments of the past.

Here are some photos to show some of what we have been doing in class this term!

My Vosaic Recording and Feedback

 Within our school, we have been asked to use vosaic.com, to record and analyse a lesson related to our Inquiry focus.

I have done one with a group of children, exploring the Numicon Shapes and the relationship between them and the numerals we write - Eg. 11 is 1 ten shape and a 1 shape. Unfortunately the audio recording was not of high quality, so I needed to rewrite much of the transcript and no student voice was picked up. This led my reflection to be on my own teaching as opposed to student voice (which I am much more interested in and will try to do next time)!

I entered the following prompt into the website:

"Does the teacher effectively explain and communicate the purpose of the lesson?" 

And this is what I got!

Screenshot from my Vosaic Recording.

Second CoL Meeting - Academic Readings

Unfortunately I was unwell and unable to attend our second CoL Meeting of the year today.

We were asked to do the following before we met:

And these were the quotes I prepared:

I found it interesting, particularly as I am inquiring into Maths already, the line about girls' self-perceptions in Mathematics being related to having higher verbal achievements, when so much discussion within my school has centred around the importance of understanding language to advance Mathematics achievement. It is definitely an area I am looking to purposefully build into my teaching - looking to bridge the gap between the two Mathematics programmes we are using; Numicon in Year 3 to Pr1me in Year 4. They both incorporate Mathematical language expectations for the children, but I need to look into how they are relate to each other across the programmes - as well as the vocabulary mentioned within the new Mathematics Curriculum itself.

I also really reflected on the statement about cultural value placed on Mathematics versus Sports for instance. It is naturally going to affect children, when families show a bias towards one area or another. I suppose as educators we need to balance that; not just favouring Mathematics, but showing how Sports and Mathematics can be equally valuable to the enrichment of our students' lives.

Numicon PD Today

 We had Numicon PD in our school today for the Junior School teachers from Years 1-3. It was really good to get together as a Junior team and start to figure out where to even start with this programme. It has been a little frustrating waiting for the hands on materials to arrive, but we should be able to hit the ground running on Monday apparently!

Numicon has come across as a more confusing system than the Pr1me Maths Programme, in terms of ease of getting stuck in and implementing it in the classroom. I have been more inclined to pursue the Pr1me programme for this reason, but after today I am starting to get excited about what Numicon has to offer.

A lot of the reticence I have felt about Numicon was finally laid to rest today and it really comes down to how to navigate the planning resources on their website. There are a lot of clicks and a lot of steps to even access your lesson (as you can see in the example I have prepared below):

I think I will need to organise the planning accessible from the website into my own planning slides, that I can either print and have hard copy, or at least be able to access from my own Google Drive, as I dislike the thought that I am reliant on internet access to be able to continue with my lessons in the moment. I would also like to see the whole lesson sequence in one glance, so that I can better manage the timing of each lesson component, especially while learning this new system.

I am going to launch into 'Getting Started' next week - which is really a focus on the children getting stuck into the materials and familiar with how to use them. I am hoping to start on the first lesson after Getting Started - 'Numbers and the Number System 1' before we get to the holidays, but we will see how we go!

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.

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!