Reading Recovery Progress

So excited to have Corey come off reading recovery. He has made such great progress. He started at Level 8 and finished reading Level 19 easy after 16 weeks. This has been really rewarding and I'm really proud of him. To add to this Shaun and Anna-Rose are close to finishing also. Shaun started at Level 5 and is now reading 17 well. Over the next couple of weeks I will support him further with his writing and understanding of print concepts. He has gained a huge amount of confidence in his abilities to read and write and I have really enjoyed being a part of this for him. Anna-Rose's biggest weakness is her fluency and phrasing and I'm finding it difficult to help her improve this. With a lot of reminding and prompting she can phrase 2-3 words together ok but still not whole sentences. As stated in Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals Part 2. I think staccato word-by-word reading is now a habit for Anna-Rose and it's going to take a while to break it. A strategy I will try this week is to slide a card across the text making her speed up. Olivia is my most challenging student. She is making progress but it is very slow. She seems to have a lot of problems with visual memory. Her decoding is fairly good when she looks carefully but she is very slow due to her often not recognising high frequency words. Finally I have Anaru who is almost finished his Roaming lessons. He is very enthusiastic and I think he will progress quite quickly. He has a lot of good skills that I am hoping will come together to help him fly.

Developmental Play

Part of my philosophy (particularly for juniors) is that it's really important to have time to play. It allows the students to be creative with no pre-determined agenda. The students can choose what they want to play with, in what way and who with. The teachers join in and participate along side the students, offering suggestions at times but mostly allowing the children to lead. It is a great opportunity for building relationships and modelling appropriate social behaviour. In terms 1 and 2 we had Developmental play for at least half an hour most days. This term will be a lot less due to junior show practises, olympics and cross country practises. I truly believe that this time is really positive for our students especially our students who need more positive interactions with their peers and teachers, and more support for dealing with disappointment. Therefore we are finding times to fit this in where we can.

 




This Blog has some similar ideas http://blog.core-ed.org/blog/2014/04/powerful-play-continuity-and-inquiry-for-children-starting-school.html 

Writing Weaknesses

At team meeting this week we looked at writing as a whole team. We discussed weaknesses within our writing assessment results.
Overall weaknesses are - sentences, ideas, spelling, vocab, punctuation and editing.

In our class this term we have half an hour teacher aide support each day for writing. We are using our teacher aide to work firstly with our most independent students to help them to develop their ideas further while allowing us to give more time to our more needy children. When/if she finishes with these groups then she will do alphabet sound/sight word games and activities with our lower students who need some extra support.

The goals for our higher writers is to develop more detail and introduce a variety of sentence types. They need to work on using interesting vocabulary, checking their punctuation and begin to edit their work.

Our lower writers need to develop a better understanding of the difference between letters and words. They need to use spaces, lowercase/uppercase letters and punctuation correctly. They also need confidence to write more on their own.