2016 - End of Year Summary Meeting

Tuesday 22nd November 2016

1.  What is your biggest success?

• The working relationship with Tara - it has been consistent, supportive and allows for both of us to support each other and the kids.

2.  Where are you at with your goals?

• Reading Recovery (RR): Very successful in supporting RR kids and all kids.  Awesome progress across the class.  RR strategies are making a difference - cross over of prompts ...YAY!
• Creation if successful programmes in a collaborative environment:  Worked well together to accelerate progress.  Exciting acceleration noted (Sarah B). Ensured maths has still been a focus - seeing neat stuff in maths.  Evidence is the engagement of the children.  Student-led "I wonder" questions have driven inquiry - has been really engaging for kids.  Development play in the afternoon has shown an decrease in the aggressive / angry behaviour.  Both teachers on the same page.  Wondering about how much we include Petera - is it enough, do we have enough leadership of his programme?
• Assessment - anecdotal notes:  Using modelling books, but still not at a point where we are happy with this.  Tried digitising it, but it is a challenge to capture evidence when teaching.

3.  Target students - what difference have you made? Evidence?

• RR kids (Anna-Rose, Corey, Shaun) - see assessments
• Sarah has made great progress - evidence in assessments
• Te Anga - just see where he is at in class and the playground.  Major change!

4.  Changes for 2017?

• Will be different with less RR hours and more in-class together time
• Want to include ideas from Rototuna School writing observation
• Many structures will stay the same
• Inquiry has been different - better this term
• Open times for transition visits are good.  Need to strengthen the EC centre visits - Rikki needs to be there!  Need to keep taking ex-pupils with us
• Wondering from Rikki: Where does Te Whāriki fit with the thinking about your programme?

5. SLT support for 2017?

• Continuing support for us to try our ideas out in class
• Support to allow us to continue our PD around writing in our class
• Ongoing support for class behavioural/pastoral need
• Clear guidelines for expectations and "checking up/checking in on" around things like appraisal/class blogs
• Just being there when we need it :)

Appraisal Goals

As the year winds down I guess it's time to start looking at the goals I set for myself at the start of the year.

1) Successfully participate and complete Reading Recovery Training to support target students across classes, colleagues and our own class practice.

The Reading Recovery Training that I have got this year has been really beneficial to both my reading recovery students and our class students. I have seen all my students, so far, on Reading Recovery be successfully discontinued. Even my most challenging student is now looking as though she will be successfully discontinued by the end of the year. Within our class programme, I have had more students meet the after 1 year reading and writing standards than before. The main teaching techniques that have crossed over from reading recovery to my classroom techniques are probably the prompts that I use to encourage students to become more self

2) Create successful programmes to accelerate and engage students collaboratively with Tara and Petera in all curriculum areas linking to the NZC, with a particular focus on target students in literacy and social/emotional skills.

This year I feel that we have successfully accelerated and engaged students across the curriculum. We have had great results in reading and writing, with very encouraging 6 year observational surveys. We have also seen some great achievements in maths. Our inquiry this term has been the most engaging as it's been very student led. The topics have been changing quickly and the students are really loving the opportunity to ask all their "I wonder" questions. We have also been using our developmental play in the afternoon to model and develop social/emotional literacy. There has been an improvement in the amount/intensity of aggressive behaviour by some students.

3) Collaboratively record anecdotal notes around students' ongoing learning and progress to guide and support further learning and to provide evidence when reporting back to parents and colleagues with a particular focus on target students.

We have been using our modelling books mostly for this. Although we've tried to do this digitally, it has been difficult to keep it up to date as we go for some lessons - particularly writing. We do use digital tracking of more formal assessments effectively.

Observing at Rototuna School

This week we got to go and visit Rototuna School. What they are doing there for writing sat very well with a lot of my own beliefs and philosophies about learning to write. They have a huge focus on teaching the "how to" of writing rather than worrying about the product. Students are given a whole class motivator at the start of writing where oral language is modelled and extended. They are then sent off to write independently after sharing their idea with the teacher and class. (Giving those who aren't sure what to write about some more thinking time and ideas). They are not required or expected to write about what they talked about on the mat.

Once students are writing, the teacher calls down small groups to do short lessons on spelling or sentence structure things. e.g. 1 group was working on the short a sound. They did 5 minutes of work around this sound - writing words that have it and circling the letter writing the sound before going back to write independently.

The teacher did not work with the children on their actually piece of writing. At the end of the lesson she will roam and give "over the shoulder" conferencing before everyone comes down to share and celebrate.

Students were identifying their own successes in their books. Circling capital letters, fullstops etc.

The big focus for explicit teaching and assessment was around phonological awareness and sounds.

I am excited to make some plans that use a lot of these ideas for next year. Particularly having Tara and I in the classroom together more, I think we can really make some huge progress for our kids. We also hope to trial some of these ideas before the end of the year, especially with our students who are not yet achieving as well as we would like.

Link to notes from observation
Link to SEED website

Kindy Visits - Relationships with ECE centres

Today we did our Kindy Visit day. We decided to take 2 students with us to each centre which was really nice and broke the ice a wee bit. The students played at the centres for a short time and read a book to some children. We spoke with the teachers and students, particularly the ones we know are coming to us. We dropped off the new pamphlets as well. I think this is a positive thing for us to do to build those relationships but it was a full on day. I'm glad Rikki came with us too as it made it look like a real team. Two of the centres wanted to talk about how transitioning kids to school and whether what they are doing is effective, so that was good to have those discussions.

Holiday Oral Language Reading

Over the September break Tara and I did a lot of reading about Oral Language and how to develop it further in our class. Specific summaries of the reading we did can be found in the link below.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B7PFZ93wCjTaSjB5Ukl0MTdOSzQ

The overall conclusions we have drawn from all this reading is that we want to embed more oral language development in all areas of our programme. We are specifically conscious of this in our inquiry lessons and developmental play. However, we haven't done too much specific planning around it as you never quite know where the discussion is going to go. I'd like to do more retrospective planning as to what we have covered but haven't found a way to make this manageable.

I had wanted to do some Oral Language testing, particularly on some of our lower students and then another test at the end of the term but with other testing and commitments it will have to wait til next year now.

Promoting Our School

This term a big focus for Tara and I has been about promoting the school. Tara created new pamphlets about our school and I have created pamphlets about transitioning to school, The Turaki Way. This has taken a lot of time but is hopefully going to have a positive impact on the image of the school and encourage some new enrolments. My latest venture is to create a new website for the school. I have been looking at other schools' websites and asking staff for their input as to what we think is important to have on the website as a starting point. I am starting it off quite simply as we can always add to it. I think the image of our school can only be improved by having a vibrant and informative website.

Here is the website so far http://emmat00.wixsite.com/mysite