Session 9 - Sharing and Reflection

 

Some of the best PD I have done in a very long time!  So thought provoking but so practical.  I have taken so may ideas away from here and implemented them within my class and have seen instant buy in from my learners.  

Some big take aways as we wrapped it all up today is ensuring we are planning for things to happen, as if we don't plan for it they often don't happen.  This is expecially true with create tasks and blogging.  How am I going to keep this momentum going and ensure I am doing this? Where are we planning for blogging in our weekly planning? Being deliberate about what to blog helps to increase student understanding and efficacy.

I would like to implement a hub wide tracking of what we are covering but also looking at how we are responding to blog posts.  This will be something we work on together as I have two BT's this year who are learning their craft.  Together we can create/tweek something that works for us.

A thought provoking question today was how often a term would we expect to see a response to text blogs? For me it would be ideally once a fortnight.  How are these seen and responded to to be purpsoeful for the learners. An opportunity to seek feedback from our learners as to what they like about feedback.

The other take away for me today which slots in really nicely with what our school is doing around AFL is looking at feedback. How are we giving this and how are are the students respnding to feedback. I know I still get students who click done and not actually read or respond to feedback, how can we do this? I feel there needs to be some more direct teaching around responding to feedback for my learners.

So many fabulous people, so many inspiring conversations and so many amazing resources!!

Thank you to all who made this happen - you are all amazing!!

Next Steps:

• Create some 'one stop' shops for vocab and graphic organisers
• Work with my team to look at text selection and text coverage
• Contunue on with the mahi and inspire others through leading whole school PLD next term.

Reader Profile Survery Update

 I am so pleased that I had the opportunity to 'redo' this activity with my class.  So powerful.  I shared the before and after results with them at the end of last week and we had some really robust discussions aroudn them and what they felt had been the biggest shift makers for them.  

Key points they shared were:

😀Enjoying the different activities around responses to text and the opportunites to choose and work with friends

😀Having Epic and being allowed to have audio books 

😀Having opportunities to learn new words and actually understand what they mean

Create Activties - so proud!!

After trialling new create tasks with my class I have been blown away.  The class have really responded to trying new things and were especially fans of creating themselves as the image to illustrate a poem.  I took this one step further in the collaboration element and asked the students to screencast themselves reading the poem.  The only prerequisite I had for this was that they all has a turn in reading.

Check out these amazing creations!!  So proud!

https://gmszaviaha.edublogs.org/2024/08/29/if-i-go-west-from-here/

https://gmsjinnier.edublogs.org/2024/08/30/create-task-reading/

Session 8 -Creating in Response to Text

 

Today has been a fantastic session.  Really reflective and lots of great ideas!  I have taken so many notes of things that I would like to start using or things I have done in the past and have forgotten about.

I think reminding us of the purpose of creating is not just to look good but also be reflective and purposeful.  How am I using them to engage the learners and ensure that they are applying their understanding.  The message from Dorothy "We want learners to not only have have opportunities to create digitally but also to create across the spectrum of disciplines that include art, music, movement, drama, and all forms of making. It is important to capture these creative artefacts and responses using the affordances of digital technologies."

Creating classrooms that inspire creativity. This activity that we did today fits perfectly with a poem that I have selected for next weeks instructional reading and I am really excited to incorporate this into the planning. My class are now really familiar with recording themself reading so this will be a creative and purposeful way of presenting this to an audience.

I am also really excited to have a go at using the green screen idea where the elarners can put themselves into the image. Again this will slot really well into next weeks poem and both activities will be easy to tie into my current learning intentions. Exciting!!

The tighter stencil designs for purpose is something that I have done a bit of, but I like the ideas of refining it even better and will use the one I created today with my poetry activities for next week. My class are not going to know whats hit them with all this creativity :)

A couple of things I have picked up from today that I would really like to implement straight away is when my students link their blog posts to our hand in sheet that I have some way of them randomly commenting on their classmates work. This will help to have even more purpose for the creat tasks and a collaborative approach to reflection. The other thing I would like to look into further is crating a routine of creating visual book reviews.  Maybe allocating 2 children per week and having a space on our reading page on our blog to store these. A bit like a DigitalBookflix?

Session 6 - Vocabulary (& Decoding)

So much learning!  I have loved all the new different ideas of how I can introduce vocbulary building into my reading programme.

It is not to late to still be introducing some of these structured teachings around the 7 syllable types to my Year 7 and 8's I know that there a gaps with a number of my learners. I am going to work through the Morpheme Matrices and make a long term plan to help fill some of these gaps. This is a fantastic resource to use as a starting point.

I have picked up so many fantastic ideas today and wonderful resources it is going to be timely to sit an look at these carefully and how I can build them into my classroom programme. Over the holidays will be a perfect oppourtunity to do this an build into a LTP. With changes in my hub it will be a great opportunity to introduce something new and have us all working on the same page. In order to do this i will make some reflective changes to my classroom timetable. I think I am better to do this over the holiday break when I have time to think and implement it properly.

This is a really valuable quote which I would like to share with both my class and the teachers in my hub as I feel sometimes by learners become a little complacent when learning new words. Also as a teacher I am now reflecting on how I have been teaching vocab. I now think I have been doing a 'token gesture' and not providing deep rich tasks.

I really like the word knowledge graphic organiser. I can see this being a fantastic task to be using in modelling books with the students. It really builds a picture of what learners know. Thank goodness the holidays are coming and I can take some time to really delve into all these amazing things and modify my planning and pracitce! I am looking forward to seeing it in practice with my class in Term3 :)

Session 5 Reflections ( Planning a Reading Programme)

This week has been very timely and reflective for me with regards to adding more interesting and engaging ideas into my weekly planning.  I love the reading apps that we were shown today which I had not heard of and it was awesome to get a chance to explore these.  Also finding out that Epic does so much more than I thought!  Definitely some 'play time' requried for me to see how I can best utilise these within my class.  The idea of making text sets really appeals to me at present, as there is a huge range of texts in there around what we will be moving on to next week around cultures and traditions leading into our schools cultural festival in week 9. 

 Literacy Planet is definitely one I would like to explore, in particular the Parts of Speech components.  To add a new dimension into my Word Work. 

The biggest learning takeaway for me this week is the importance of keeping things fresh.  We often can become comfortable in the familiar as teachers but we need to keep changing things up for the learners to keep their engagement.  Not only in the tasks that we are wanting them to complete but also looking at the groups with which we are teaching.  There is definitely a place for much more fluidity with my groups.  Next term will be potentially a great time to be trialling this with some possible changes happening within our teaching hub.

My big take away and try from this session is the scaffolded writing task that we worked on with Naomi.  We are concentrating on narrative texts at present and I can see this working really nicely to support some of my more reluctant writiers but also be taken a step further for my more creative students.  I will be sure to blog some of their creations! 

Tomorrow I am attending a PLG around reading and I will be sure to be sharing some of the new Apps from today to inspire my colleagues on how they could possibly implement these to change up their reading programmes. I am excited to see how these changes engage my learners.

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of the kaupapa and pedagogy of the Manaiakalani Reading Programme ?

• What did I learn that could improve my capability and confidence in teaching reading?

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

• What did I learn that could be shared within my wider community, with either colleagues, or whānau/aiga?

Session 4 Reflections: Guided Reading (& Comprehension)

• Over the course of the day I have had many opportunities to increase my understanding. I have reflected on what I am currently doing within my planning and what it is I actually want from my learners. I believe I need to dedicate a good chunk of time to getting myself better planned and prepared to get myself into a routine and implementing good systems. At present it is not working for me so I need to look at how I can imbed the pedagogy better.

• Preparation is the key. It is not a subject that we can teach effectively and meet the needs of our learners without putting in the ground work. It is important that we can spend the time to prepare in order to get the desired outcomes. This is definitely a key point I need to take back to my team whom I feel could also do with a refresher around this and the planning for the students and their learning needs element. How can we set ourselves up for success both for ourselves and pur learners?

• So many learning opportunities to develop reading responses. The idea of setting up a 'one stop shop' of graphic organisers and set out under each reading strategy is a fantastic idea for developing independence and self directed learning. This would have to be built up over time as each strategy is taught and revised. I am also going to develop an on line modelling book that the learners have access to which reflects our learning. I need to put the time into developing my planning and linking these all together to have the desired outcomes I want. I have so many ideas floating around in my brain - now to implement them!

• Within my hub I would like to share the ways in which we can enhance our planning. The text from *Fountas and Pinnell offer ‘strategic actions’ to teach, prompt and reinforce skills. This is a great resource for drawing out key questions within our planning. This will become a key feature with our hub planning as I know that this is an area that has not been happening so well.

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• So much food for thought today. To make myself a to do list and tick things off around my planning. I think that this will make me feel that I have more organisation and control over my reading programme. At present I feel that I am doing things but no necessarily doing this well! Watch this space