Team Meeting - Oral Language with Pam

What is effective teaching of Oral Language for natural English speaking students?

Books to look into.....

Are teachers teaching Oral Language explicitly or informally catering for Oral Language needs?

Children that can't express themselves/communicate their needs/wants/feelings are of course more likely to have behaviour issues. 

Our feelings were that morning talk, news, think, pair, share etc were not explicit teaching but rather just allowing opportunities for talking. 

Any lesson can become an Oral Language lesson but we need to spend time explicitly teaching rather than just incidental.

Teaching just a lesson from a book just because it looks good/fun doesn't specifically cater for their needs...

Learning through talk - p. 42-43 has good ideas for expectations at School Entry, At the End of Year 1, At the End of Year 3.

Try JOST with Hunter. Use Oral Language expectations, Communication Processes and Blank Language Scheme etc to look at what gaps he might have.

file:///Users/Teacher/Downloads/Definitions+of+achievement+for+National+Standards.pdf

14th June 2016 Incredible Years – Early Childhood perspective PD Alison Flutey

Just found these notes.....

14^th June 2016

Incredible Years – Early Childhood perspective PD

Alison Flutey

If children can’t manage themselves behaviourly then they can’t “learn academically” We see this time and time again and the time and effort put into "improving their behaviour" pays off in the end.

How can we continue to build/develop relationships with our “difficult” students…

What other proactive strategies do we need to use?

Suggestion not to use “endearments” – not professional – should use names. I personally think that some children may never be shown much love and it's my nature to use "endearments" towards all my students.

Children notice if you don’t talk to them or don’t talk to their parents…..

Using parents’ names is important too.

Our play “golden time” in the afternoon is a great way to build relationships. Letting children take the lead and sitting at their level. Modelling desired behaviours along side them, rather than taking over.

Commenting is much more useful than questioning. – giving positive attention to desired behaviour.

Emotional commenting is very powerful for our vulnerable children.

-       Use words like calm, proud, excited, confident, frustrated, disappointed

‘Using when and then’ & ‘Short commands’ – feeling like we use these well – particularly with our difficult children. What about when these aren't working......

Remembering to praise for little things

What choices can we give to our children to help them do the right thing? You need to do your work vs are you going to do it by yourself or with my help? Maybe this will work better than "when/then" for some

Waiting rather than sharing – Learning to wait is more difficult but more helpful than having to share – May need to use commenting some more on that.

Ignore behaviour not the child – praise the minute they are doing the right thing to feed back into the self esteem.

Try not to show the children how frustrated you might be feeling with them.

Children coming to you upset start with “well done you walked away”.  Emotional/social coaching. Then what would you like to do about that?

Need to get back to doing little certificates/notes home

Slow down and make time for positive praise.

Oral Language

After Pam's PD at staff meeting the other day I have a new increased desire to do a better job of developing our children's oral language. At Reading Recovery training this week we also looked at Oral Language which was very well timed. We were given an article from Clay's (2014) By Different Paths to Common Outcomes: Literacy learning and teaching,  which focuses on the relationship of talking with reading and writing. It suggests some things teachers can do to support children in becoming more controlled with their Oral Language.
(p. 136)
1) Create a rich context for learning
thinking about
- who talks to whom?
- what do they talk about?
- how often?
- do they listen and repeat or exchange language naturally

2) Increase language learning opportunities
Oral language learning opportunities during school hours are naturally reduced by the shift of individual to group learning. Schools need to design experiences to maximize opportunities for language construction.

3) Understand the children learn language most easily through conversation
- arrange joint focus on an activity
- extend wait time
- negotiate meanings
- personalise conversations
Does the classroom programme create conversations?

4) Consider what may make a child reluctant to speak
- shyness
- limited language control
- fear of failure
So what do we do to avoid this?

5) Recognise the importance of reading aloud to children
Children need to be exposed to a range of language structures including ones beyond their current capabilities.

6) Create a need to produce new language
Create experiences that tempt children to have something to say

7) Arrange for new sources of language
Model good language

The list continues but these were the key ones for me.
Next term Tara and I really want to have a big push on Oral Language. I have found many books to read to help to develop a programme that encourages and supports the development of oral language in our class.
If I can test a sample group of children using the ROL by the end of the term and then we can look at whether we think some progress has been made at the end of the year.

Phonics for Reading

I came across an interesting article the other day which I was very quick to disregard as it did not fit my beliefs about reading. It was slamming reading recovery techniques and promoting a fully HF word and spelling rule based approach to teaching reading. Today I found a nice counter blog article. This article focuses on the importance of meaning in reading. And that while it may be "guessing" at times, using the context of the story to attempt an unknown word, is bringing meaning to the text, and is that not what reading is.... This article really backs up my style of teaching reading, "learning to read involves much more than learning to sound out letters and identify words."
When I can find the other article again I will attach it also. Very conflicting points of view.

https://literacyforpleasure.wordpress.com/2016/07/07/why-children-should-be-encouraged-to-only-ever-use-phonics-as-a-back-up-strategy/

Writing Progressions

Below is what is stated in the Literacy Progressions for The First Year of School. I feel we are doing a good job of teaching writing and our we seem to be following the progression below pretty well. I'm not sure that our students really understand the purposes for their writing so perhaps this is something to talk about more, particularly with our more advanced writers.

"At first, there is a high level of scaffolding as teachers help students to:

• hold an idea in their head long enough to write it down
• say, hear, and record the predominant sounds in the words they want to write
• write from left to right and leave spaces between words
• form letters accurately.

Gradually, the support alters as teachers help students to build and strengthen their processing systems and to create longer, more complex texts. Students learn to:

Studies of effective teachers have shown that they continually make explicit the connections between reading and writing. Teachers who have a grasp of this reciprocal relationship recognise that writing is neither secondary to reading nor something to be taught separately from reading.

Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1 to 4, page 113

• experiment with capturing words from their oral vocabulary
• hear and say the initial and final sounds and some dominant medial sounds in the words they want to write
• recognise and identify common sounds in different words
• use their developing visual memory to consistently encode (spell) some known words correctly
• make close attempts to encode words by using their developing knowledge of phoneme–grapheme relationships, which enables them to:
  • understand that words are made up of sounds and that sounds are written with letters
  • write all consonant sounds, and represent some vowel sounds, in at least one way
  • attempt to record the sounds within words in sequence
• make close attempts to encode words by noticing visual similarities to known words
• attempt to use capital letters and full stops as they develop their understanding of sentences
• reread what they write as they are writing and read (or retell) their writing to themselves and others.

Students in the first year of school are becoming increasingly aware of the purposes for their writing, and they use a range of text forms. They can express their ideas in increasingly interesting ways as they gain control over using more complex language structures, including varied ways of beginning sentences."

http://www.literacyprogressions.tki.org.nz/The-Structure-of-the-Progressions/The-first-year?q=node/11

Literacy Learning in the First Year

This morning I have been writing reports. I went back into the Literacy Progressions to look at next steps etc for the reports and then had a bit of a look at the "The First Year" section. This outlines the sorts of things students should be doing before the "After 1 year" standard.
This reminded me of a few things and I felt it was good to bring back into the front of my mind, particularly for those student's who have taken a while to get cracking.

"Children’s oral language provides a foundation for their reading and writing at school. Their oral language knowledge, skills, and attitudes will continue to be extended by the oral language practices of the classroom as well as by the children’s developing expertise in reading and writing.

The oral language foundation that supports children’s school reading and writing includes:

• curiosity about oral language and a willingness to experiment with it, for example, by playing with rhyme and alliteration
• a wide oral vocabulary of nouns and verbs and also many adjectives and prepositions
• a willingness, and the confidence, to talk about things happening now, in the past, and in the future
• the ability to retell an experience, an event, or a known text
• an awareness of rhyme and of words that start with the same sound, along with the ability to hear and distinguish some other phonemes in spoken words."

Many of our kids do not start with much of the above at all. After almost 1 year at school our lowest student is just beginning to be able to retell a small part of an experience, hear and distinguish some phonemes etc. This highlighted to me the importance of going back to basics and trying hard to fit in some more opportunities to develop oral language. I'm still not sure where to fit that into our day!


In regards to writing, our same low students certainly did not come to school with the skills that are assumed by many of the ministry documents.

"When they start school, children enjoy “writing” for a variety of purposes and they can “read” their story or text to another person. They may “write” by making purposeful marks that are not recognisable as letters or words. When children “read” their own “written” stories, they demonstrate that they know what writing is and that they can hold an idea in their head long enough to retell the story.

Many children will also have mastered specific skills that support writing, for example:

• they write their own name using the correct letters in the correct order
• they form some other letters correctly
• they can securely hold a pencil, crayon, or other writing and drawing tool."

They are only now beginning to write their own name correctly, form some other letters correctly, "read" their own stories. Some of these students have been at school for almost 12months.  This provides a huge challenge for us as teachers. The children who do come to school with these skills jump straight into learning to read and write successfully. Leaving those that don't behind. We now have a huge gap in our class of students who are progressing well with a good understanding of written language to those who are only just gaining the understandings that the others started school with. These "poor" readers and writers are constantly being overtaken by other new students who have come with these good understandings.

Of course once they are at school it's up to us as teachers to do everything we can to support them. 

"Students begin reading and writing from their first day at school. Effective teachers build on the literacy knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students bring to their school learning.

Much of the school day revolves around literacy. In addition to shared and guided reading and writing, teachers support their students’ literacy learning with a rich mix of approaches, including language experience and frequent reading to students. They provide many opportunities for students to read and write independently and to engage in purposeful literacy tasks."

This is very much in the philosophy of my teaching practise. Students are included in reading and writing groups from their first day at school. Any attempt and success is celebrated. We spend a large part of our day focused specifically on literacy and literacy is integrated through most other parts of the day as well. 

All quotes are from the Literacy Learning Progressions on TKI 

Reading Progressions Magenta - Blue

Below are some illustrations straight from the Literacy Learning Progressions about in The First Year. I found them very helpful in confirming what we are doing in our room. We are aiming for students to be reading at yellow after 6months at school. We move students off magenta as soon as they have 1 to 1 pointing. They illustrations give a simple a short explanation of expected behaviours at skills for each level which is helpful to keep in the forefront of our practise.

"Although students progress at different rates, they all need to be at or near Yellow level after six months of instruction in order to reach the goal of reading at Green level by the end of the first year of school. The intention is that students will spend just long enough at each reading level for teachers to observe and confirm that appropriate processing behaviours are in place. Students have many opportunities for independent reading to strengthen their reading processing systems.

From Look at Me by Miriam Macdonald, Ready to Read (Magenta)

As soon as students start school, they begin reading texts at Magenta level. At this level, they need to:

• develop early concepts about print, such as the ideas that the print carries the message and that print is read from left to right¹
• expect a text to make sense and sound right
• gain control over one-to-one word matching.

From Lāvalava by Lino Nelisi, Ready to Read (Red)

At Red level, students are learning how to process print. They make meaning of text by applying their increasing ability to attend to the print detail and their growing knowledge of sentence structures and also by using their expanding reading vocabulary and the illustrations. They need to:

• know that words are made up of sounds and that letters represent sounds
• attend to initial letters and common infl ections (for example, -s, -ed, -ing) as they read
• understand the function of some simple punctuation
• read groups of words together in phrases
• gain control over using a return sweep with multiple lines of text
• notice some errors in their reading and take action to self-correct.

Students at this level have a sense of excitement about their reading and are keen to share the connections between the texts they read and their own experiences.

From Purr-fect! by Dot Meharry, Ready to Read (Yellow)

At Yellow level, students are developing their ability to search for and use interrelated sources of information (semantic, syntactic, and visual and graphophonic).²They use a wider range of word-solving strategies and comprehension strategies to make or confirm meaning. They need to be able to:

• decode simple, regular words by using their knowledge of grapheme–phoneme relationships and by making analogies to known rimes
• use sentence structure and context to supplement information gained from partial decoding attempts
• understand the function of some language and punctuation features (for example, the use of pronouns and speech marks to help track dialogue between characters)
• use comprehension strategies such as forming hypotheses and making simple inferences.

Students at Yellow level enjoy discussing the texts they read and offering opinions about them. Their reading is fluent and well-phrased, and they usually read without finger pointing.

From The Hissing Bush by Trish Puharich, Ready to Read (Blue)

At Blue level, students apply their reading processing strategies to longer and more varied texts. They need to:

• monitor their reading, searching for and using multiple sources of information in order to confirm or self-correct
• recognise many high-frequency words automatically
• engage more deeply with texts (for example, by using comprehension strategies to generate their own questions or to evaluate the effectiveness of a text).

Students at this level are curious about language. They enjoy discovering new things and talking about their discoveries (for example, noticing that they can work out a compound word by recognising the components). They read some sections of text silently."

http://www.literacyprogressions.tki.org.nz/The-Structure-of-the-Progressions/The-first-year?q=node/11

Teacher - Staff Feedback

Here are the notes that Tara and I spoke to about how we are working in our class...

Tara & Emma feedback

Maths:

• Maths always used to be the thing that got missed if the day got busy. So we do it first thing everyday so that it doesn’t get missed.

• The first standard for maths is pretty easy to reach as the children only have to be able to count really.
• We try to include our “strand” maths with our inquiry topics where possible or with our reliever on our Reading Recovery release days so as not to disrupt the “number” lessons.
• A lot of focus on number knowledge. Try to create a really strong base of understanding to build from.  
• Small ability based groups. Each group seen every day. Follow up worksheet straight after teacher session so it can be explained well.
• Numeracy profiles provide more info for grouping/next steps than the GLOSS. We individually “test” at least once a term for the profiles. (Emma)

Reading:

• Our Reading Recovery training is really benefiting our students.

• Very flexible groups. Often have kids reading in two groups when they are between groups. Monthly running records on all kids help us to be clear about where they need to be working.
• Really happy with the progress in most of our children. Children who were at risk of being targets 6 months ago have really taken off now - Te Anga, Kaea and Sarah in particular. They are still below but only just. Te Anga reading level 9 and is only just 6 now. Kaea level 8. Sarah isn’t 6 til the end of Sept and is also reading level 9 so should be very close to standard by her birthday. Rewarding home reading and communication with home has helped with this. Both Te Anga and Sarah have taken extra work home.
• Short sharp reading lessons. 10 minutes per group max. Focus is on reading the book and looking at tricky words as they come up. Pre-read talk is important for helping with meaning.
• HF work with spelling cards and daily worksheets. Last term we had daily blend worksheets.

Writing:

• Week long piece of writing. Motivation/brainstorm/picture plan etc on monday.
• Add a sentence or 2 each day. Helps to build an interesting story/message while doing it in lengths they can manage. Re-reading everyday.
• Small groups so they can be supported by teacher to learn about spacing, letter sounds, full stops and capitals. More advanced groups are sent off to complete some work independently.

Need help with:

Hunter

• He is low in literacy areas, reading L3 (hard), writing 1i. Behaviour has a lot to do with this, a lot of defiance - no patterns (day, teacher, time, subject, group). Other behaviour has decreased and his sticker chart is becoming harder (needs to get 10 stickers not 5) and he is fine with that.

Sarah

• Works well independently (running records) and at home but struggles with all group tasks. Lack of focus. How can we help her to keep up with her group and focused?

Suggestions:

Teacher Aide use:

• Works with lower of top group to support independent writing. Allows Teacher to work with lower writers without interruption.
• If she finishes with those students then she plays alphabet and spelling activities with low literacy learners to help develop this knowledge when they are not working with the teacher.

Pam's Writing PD

Turaki School Staff Meeting Notes - What are good writers?

This is what we thought Good Writers do:
- Sequenced ideas
- Express ideas coherently
- Be able to re-read
- Motivated/Belief in their ability/Try
- Interesting language
- Personal voice
- Engaging for the audience
- Go back and check and make changes

Poor Writers:
- not motivated
- easily frustrated
- unable to even verbally communicate ideas (oral language)
- don't have the skills to hear/record sounds, form letters, develop ideas, use different sentences, punctuation
- avoid the task
- not risk takers/needy

Pam - asked the question - Are we looking at growing writers or are we just looking at the end product?

The curriculum talks about expressing, identifying and forming.

At Rototuna school - Kylie Morris

Critical to make connections between oral language and reading and writing. The oral language is so important. They need the vocab before they can describe etc....

Seeding language/language play - starting sessions with lots of talk around an artefact/picture/video. Children are asked to notice. Teacher listens and thinks about what needs to be grown - vocab/facts.

Growing sentences - Sentence patterns - the balloon has, the balloon can.

Write from the motivation rather than about it.

Things to look into
- Different sentence patterns to teach
- More opportunities for talking amongst themselves


Things that back up what we are doing in STU
- Our Monday motivation/talk session is really important. Maybe we don't need to jump into that first sentence on that day. Could record what we talked about with iPad (all oral not written).

Junior Show

This term I volunteered to create a junior show for our kids to get a chance to perform. I felt this was really important for our kids to have this opportunity. It is short and sweet with just 5 weeks prep. I have delegated a fair bit with Tara taking on the logistical planning - booking buses, writing notices etc and Nat taking charge of costumes/props which are all student made.
I have had to work hard to ensure that everyone is on the same page as me about the general feeling of the show. I didn't want it to be a big "production" but rather a fun exploration of the performing arts.

Maths

Listening to Charmaine today giving her feedback about how she is working with her targets made me consider how we might need to be exposing our kids to a wider range of problems and talk about which strategies to choose rather than just developing more and more strategies. They need to know what to do when they see/hear the maths problem. Particularly our more able students who have a good knowledge and understanding of numbers already.