Distance Learning Again!

 I thought it might be worth a short blog post to share how we've attempted to best teach Reading, trying to maintain some progress for our students in a distanced learning / 'Bubble School' world.

Here are some resources that my team has put together:

Back to School for Level 2...

We are back at school and there has been a shift in our School's PLD focus to Reading. Therefore the direction of my professional Inquiry is changing again. I am proud of the way my team adapted to the challenges of going into lockdown and the resources we produced for the children on our site. I look forward to getting back to ‘business as usual’ with a focus on my Reading Programme.

I have taken on more of our able, high-achieving readers from within the team, but still have a group of mostly Year 3s, stuck at the end of Green. I really feel that with a push from me, they have the potential to progress much closer to the desired 8 years reading age by the end of this year. 

My Inquiry Focus question has become: 

How can I lift student achievement and fluency in Reading, to progress hesitant readers from a Reading Age of 6 years, to 8 years?

In our staff meeting this week, we have been asked to go away and identify what our learners are doing when they come to an unknown word. Here is what I have found.

Name	EOY 2019 Reading Level	Current Instructional Level	Observation of reading strategies
H	9	14	? Haven't had the chance to observe due to absences.
P	11	14	Decoding, breaking words into chunks of sound, quite successfully.
T	10	14	Combination of decoding chunks, echoing others and appealing.
M	7	14	Decoding, breaking words into chunks of sound, quite successfully.
E	10	14	Appeals
K	12	14	Appeals? / Waits for others and echoes.

I have found this process useful, as it is keeping me mindful to particularly work on providing other independent strategies to the children dependent on echoing others or appealing.

I am looking forward to working closely with this group, reading with them on a daily basis as much as I can, to see if we can supercharge their learning!

Term 2, 2020! So Much Has Changed...

Well, Term 1 went in a very different direction than what I was anticipating in my last blog post!

 I was awaiting my first professional conversation around the direction to take my Maths Inquiry in, when we went into Lockdown in Term 1.

My Inquiry has now taken a different path as we have had to navigate the challenges of delivering distance learning to Year 2s and 3s. As Team Leader I've put my energy into designing a distance learning programme that would engage children in their home situations, enough that they would return to our site each day, with tasks that are achievable in a home setting and yet not too easy. 

I am proud of the open-ended tasks that we have designed during this time and the creative and individual results that were produced by our students. 

My Inquiry Question for now is: 

How can I provide accessible, achievable, engaging and rich tasks to our learners in their home environment?

Here is a link to our home learning which we are archiving as we go.

Here is some of my favourite content - as found on my Class On Air site, which is not Reading/Writing/Maths related, but was a lot of fun and put some smiles on many faces during this difficult time!

My Inquiry for 2020!

I am still a little unsure of quite how to tackle this, and am looking forward to meeting with my colleagues to discuss the best approach, but I am thinking that my Inquiry for this year will look at developing a successful Maths programme in my own class, that I can then bring to my team and we can continue to develop together. 

 I am interested in how best to incorporate the professional learning we have had in Mathematics through the DMiC PLD over the last two years, with the more prescriptive approach through using the NZC Mathematics Books as a resource throughout the school this year. I would like to try to balance the two approaches, so as to ensure full and appropriate curriculum coverage while still giving children the rich discussion and problem solving approach. 

 So, currently, my Inquiry focus question is: How can I use purposeful teaching of mathematical language to raise the achievement of my learners in Mathematics? But I am aware this doesn't quite cover the full scope of what I would like to do...

I have signed up to join a Maths Leadership Made Easy course, with Jo Knox and Marie Hirst, which I am hoping will provide me with a little more direction.

Wrapping up 2019 and looking forward to 2020!

This year, I have felt my focus pulled in various directions as things have occurred in my space throughout the year.

I am really proud of the way we, as a team, worked on our knowledge of Reading Groups' instruction. We had regular conversations around the progress of all of our students and discussed ways in which we could next target their learning to achieve shift up the levels. While progress was not the same for every student, there were some very pleasing results on the whole, as well as more knowledge and reflective practice occurring within the team.

Looking forward to 2020, I would like to attempt a similar focus on Writing within our team meetings. I feel like of all the subjects, it is the one that we are probably least on the same page about. It would be good to discuss ideas, strategies and expectations appropriate to our Year 2 learners throughout next year. Hopefully we can implement more of what Dr Jannie van Hees was modelling for us in 2019.

I am particularly interested in exploring the implementation of the Engage programme, particularly as it relates to building the 'Thinking' skill in our children. I feel like this is a skill that could be utilised across all subjects of the curriculum.

Engaging in New Directions

While encouraged by the gains my students are making in Reading, I find myself inquiring in new directions. My team have been fortunate to host Dr Jannie Van Hees in our space for two sessions this term. She has guided us through ways in which to enrich our students' writing and encourage them to become quality authors who write the detail. So this area will, undoubtedly, be an area in which I direct a lot of effort in the term to come.

 I also, was lucky enough to attend a Professional Development session on ENGAGE. This programme aims to grow students' capabilities at managing themselves through co-operative games in three learning areas: Feeling, Thinking and Doing. Through playing these games in meaningful ways, supported with purposeful language, for 30 minutes each day over 10 weeks, children have been seen to make significant gains in their abilities to manage themselves and problem solve. I was intrigued by the (anecdotal) data I collected on my students while reflecting on their abilities in my meeting. I will include a screenshot of this to explain my thinking further:

This is a snapshot of how well I feel my students are performing in the areas labelled above. 

I found it intriguing how many children I marked as merely 'emerging' in the realm of 'Thinking' skills. Before recording these levels, I had expected that the behavioural and emotional challenges would probably prove greater than the thinking. This result however, suggests that perhaps I am already aware, and already provide much necessary guidance in the emotional and behavioural realms and need to work further on helping students to gain skills in remembering instructions and blocking out distractions as well as some fine and gross motor skill improvements.

By engaging in this programme for Term 4, I hope to see some real positive change, particularly in students abilities to remember multiple step instructons!

Term 3 Inquiry Update

I am really enjoying aligning my literacy teaching with our Science: The Living World, Inquiry topic for this term.

I was surprised, early on in the term by how many, what I had assumed 'basic' words, were missing from a large number of my students' vocabularies. I was wondering how to teach concepts about habitats, adaptation and camouflage, while realising most of my class didn't know the word 'beak'.

I have really endeavoured to read aloud to my class on a daily basis. Now that my students are in a good routine, there is enough time to really dig deep into understanding a shared text, which I feel has been beneficial to developing vocabulary knowledge around our topic.

Having put a lot of effort with my lower groups into differentiating the vowel sounds and applying this to our sounding out, I am realising that a lot of my higher level readers still have gaps in this area. So, this is an area of ongoing work.

Going forward, I want to focus the children on awareness of audience when reading and writing. I would like to encourage more 'reading to' by the students themselves. This may take shape in little self-directed video clips... I'll keep you posted!