My 2019 Inquiry - One Month In!

It has only been a few weeks since I began to narrow the focus of my Inquiry down to Reading. This has been a great time in which to get to grips with my re-grouped Reading Groups and their particular skills and needs. Unfortunately, this has also been a time of great upheaval to our regular timetable, with activities such as swimming and meetings impacting on my face to face time with my readers.

However, I have had the chance to enjoy the input of Helen Squires in my classroom, modelling how to implement Gwenneth Philips prompts as well as the follow-up word work that she has so often spoken of. I feel the small steps I have made to implement this teaching strategy are paying off, but there is still much work to do!

In the meantime, I am enjoying extending my Gold group of readers by going deep into learning areas as well as exposing them to more of a breadth of text. This week we will be learning and performing a play, which I am excited about.

I am still keen to have a buddy/mentorship programme between the children in my class, but have held off from implementing this as, with a new group of students in my class, I felt they needed time to settle in to my routines and expectations for their own learning first.

With all this in mind, I want to keep a lens on the inclusion of vocabulary building activities in my lessons. I look forward to gaining more inspiration in this department when I am on holiday soon and have the chance to read my new book 'What Every Primary School Teacher Should Know About Vocabulary', by Jannie van Hees and Paul Nation.

I am also very much looking forward to ideas and inspiration from meeting with the rest of my Inquiry group at tomorrow's staff meeting.

My Inquiry for 2019.

I am starting to put together the beginnings of my Inquiry for 2019.


 I met with my Inquiry group at our staff meeting yesterday afternoon and they have helped me decide on a starting point. I have struggled to narrow down my area of focus for this year as there is so much I can see that would be great to work on.

For now, it looks like I will inquire into "How can I raise the achievement of my students in Reading?" 

I am just beginning work with new groups for Reading this week, as we have just started cross-grouping within our space. I have two groups of three on Magenta, a group on the cusp of Red/Yellow, another group on Blue and a group of very capable Gold readers. I am thinking about how I can best make this combination work to my advantage. So I think I will begin by trialling a buddy system between my Gold and Magenta readers. The Gold readers can listen and assist with the Magentas re-reading their texts, and the Magenta readers can listen to the Gold readers practice reading to an audience.

I am keen to focus on my use of the Gwenneth Philips prompts that we have been receiving PD on in the school, particularly with my Magenta groups. I am also going to look carefully at my use of follow-up activities, to ensure they are truly targeting the students' needs. My very emergent group n particular could do with some tactile experiences to build their alphabet knowledge.

As I am also in a Manaiakalani-Google Class OnAir position this year, I will utilise the tool of videoing my lessons to see what discoveries I can make, about my teaching and the children's learning. I look forward to trying out a few different approaches and see where I am and how I'm feeling about it all at the end of the term!

End of Year Inquiry Reflection

Looking back over the last 12 months - what have been my critical successes?

I have been very happy with how focussed discussions and conversations has improved in my space over the course of this year.  Previously reluctant, (to the point of silent,) children are comfortable sharing an idea or two.

One child in particular, who used to cry throughout the day at the beginning of the year, now jokes with her friends and calls out answers on occasion, when she is excited that she might have the answer! This particular student, has progressed from a pre-emergent level of writing, to writing multiple simple sentences independently on her page. Her counting has improved from a sing song meaningless succession of numbers, to 1:1 counting and simple addition by counting all.

A number of the boys in my class, who would happily copy writing off the board but never offer their own ideas, have finally started to record their thoughts on the page. Albeit at times with the aid of the speak to talk ability of their iPad microphone. They join me in sharing the excitement of seeing their own ideas come to life. 

In general, the classroom atmosphere has calmed down as children have learned what is expected of them. We have a happy, busy and productive classroom as we finish off the year.

What things excite me as I look forward to next year? What am I wanting to achieve in 2019?

I am looking forward to a new cohort of Year 2s in the new year. I will have more of a balance of girls and boys with a mixture of leaning needs. There will be children who require a challenge, and others who will need a slow and steady, nurturing pace.

I have been accepted for the role of a Manaiakalani-Google Class OnAir teacher in 2019. I look forward to taking a critical look at my teaching and planning for learning. From my results in 2018, I feel that a focus on my writing teaching would be beneficial. Particularly, looking at how to engage my reluctant boys, who struggled to write independently, or in any great quantity.

Here are some relevant examples of my priority learners' work:

Independent work: She has made amazing progress!

Independent writing from a very reluctant speaker.

Independent writing from a priority learner.

Term 4 Inquiry Ideas

Heading into a very busy and action packed term I am mindful of keeping my Inquiry goals realistic. I was very happy with how we got to the point last term where every child participated in their own conversations. I want to continue allowing time for these conversations on a daily basis, and bring it through into our DMiC sharing - there are still some children very reluctant to discuss their ideas in this time. I am also keen to bring conversation time* through into my Writing sessions - particularly the reluctant lower end writers, who will happily copy off the board but shut down when asked for their own ideas. I hope to share some learner examples at the end of term.

*The difference between conversation time and normal instruction is that the children know there is an expectation for them to talk and share their ideas. Teacher talking will be kept to a minimum level and really just take the form of occasional prompting.

Conversational Progress

We have been getting very chatty in Room 27!

After my earlier blog post this term, we have been having some great conversations with our friends in class. Every morning, 5 - 10 minutes is given to the students for them to share their ideas with each other. No pressure is placed on them to share with the whole class, although this is welcomed when desired. Because they get to speak with their friends, every child, almost every day, is happy to take part in this. Sometimes this spills over into a writing session, but other times the focus just stays on having a relaxed and friendly conversation in class.

I try to include one 'fun' writing session each week, where the children get to be creative. Often I find thought provoking images on Pobble365.com and use these for inspiration. A particularly successful lesson occurred last week using the following image:

The children had their discussion first. Next, they were given a choice: draw this picture for yourself on your iPad or draw your own 'crazy' picture. (Eg. A bird standing on Ms Gaston's head). More than half of the children chose to use their creativity to draw their own picture. Next, they had to write about it. I was really happy with how some of my language delayed children, as well as the rest of their peers, were able to create their stories. They weren't all written down, as some were voice recorded on their iPads, but just getting them to form their own ideas was very exciting progress!

I've included a couple of videos below:

Inquiring into 'Our Children as Conversationalists'.

My Professional Inquiry has unfortunately been a bit on the back-burner after a hectic Term 2. On Tuesday of last week however, I was lucky enough to attend the Manaiakalani School Leaders PLG, and this has given me renewed inspiration to bolster my Oral Language programme. There were numerous topics of note, but I particularly want to record here, my thoughts on the presentation made to us by Dr Jannie Van Hees.

Jannie showed us a presentation on 'Our Children as Conversationalists'. She talked about the importance of talking WITH someone, or CHAINLINKING the conversation. I was made to consider the benefits of the sharing news and asking questions format that I have been working with earlier in the year. There is so much more to learn to become a true conversationalist!

This is going to form the basis of my Inquiry for the remainder of the year. I plan to explicitly teach what a conversation is and practice some of the numerous possible responses one can make, with the children in my class. Once this has become an established part of the class dynamics, I can see myself strengthening the DMiC part of my programme, where conversation is currently lacking.

I have reflected on my own conversations with my children at home, and the richness of the language that they have been exposed to their whole lives. I have always believed in speaking to children in varied and complex forms, rarely dumbing down my language unless absolutely necessary for immediate understanding. I like to think that the children in my class are exposed to the same richness of language as my children at home, however, this is probably not entirely the case.

Following Jannie's structured powerpoint presentation, I will begin by explicitly teaching 'conversation' in my class. I will post back here at the end of the term with how this is progressing!

Term 2's Inquiry - Oral Language and Vocabulary Building in the Digital Technologies

After a meeting at the end of last term about implementing the Digital Technologies curriculum, I thought this would be a good area to branch my Inquiry into for Term 2. This meeting re-inforced the notion that as exciting as coding and all the fun technology we could provide would be for the kids, they would need a lot of language around how to use and understand them.

So far this term I have been focussing on directional language. We have been looking at our left and right, forwards and backwards, and all the different prepositions we could think of. The children have enjoyed guiding their friends through mazes and discovering different words to describe concepts they already had. - Such as "beside" instead of "next to" and "between" instead of "in the middle of".

I feel like this is giving them a good basis from which to begin their coding on Scratch Jnr.

Where to next? There is always more language to be gifted, and I think the key is to not be scared to use big words that the children may not yet understand. How else are they to learn them if they never get exposed to them? Once I feel Digital Technologies vocabulary has been built up sufficiently, I will probably choose another area in which to scrutinise my teaching of subject-specific vocabulary. Given our current focus on DMiC, Maths looks like a good area to move into next.