Extending writing.

Possible template for top writers. As a model lesson for Sarah use the Stephen Graham model. Describe an object. Choose something they can touch/feel - bear from the toy box.

Use 3 different sentences  - colour, shape, feel, position, number, size, action

e.g.
The bear is brown. It has soft fur. It is sitting on the chair.

Practise with the students saying each sentence about a different toy from the toy box. Articulate capital letter and fullstop. - 1 student being the capital letter, 1 the sentence, 1 the fullstop.


Video to watch later about Jeff Anderson about writing

Maths

Today was the first time I have led maths in a long time as Tara had been doing this before she left. We have a large group of students working on their knowledge of number order to 100. I set up a hundreds board on the smart board and allowed them to work together to try and fill it in. The students enjoyed this task and it was easy to see which could quickly fill some in and which needed more support. The really cool thing was that most of the support came from their peers rather than me. They were up and moving around and I think this was really good for them too. They were peer checking and working together.

Reading Recovery Session 21/6/17

Yesterday I took Jade to Te Kuiti for our Reading Recovery inservice. Her lesson went really well. She tried hard but also showed the things she has been doing in her lessons at school so I was able to get some good feedback. The other teachers thought that I had good strategies for dealing with her delaying tactics. They had a couple of suggestions for improving Jade's sentence structure. They suggested that I provide sentence starters for her and use more direct questioning in the sentence building phase of the writing in order to help her to create a correct sentence pattern.

For Sarah and I to go through and highlight priorities

Thing Link

I came across this today. It looks like a very interesting tool for teaching and learning. https://www.thinglink.com/edu#
I think you could spend a lot of time playing with it and it may be more useful in the senior school but I thought it looked pretty awesome.

Term 2 reflections

2/5/17

Term 2 has started really well. We have jumped straight into our classroom programme with full reading, writing and maths rotations. The students have been great at coping with the changes in the programme to accommodate for our increased numbers and reading recovery timetabling changes. We are adapting to having Sue R in our class and so far this has been going really well. We are trying hard to include her as a Teacher not a TA so have asked her to take control of the Handwriting and PE programmes. We are still trying to rotate ourselves around the groups and curriculum areas so that we get to see all students at all levels. We have had 2 new students start and they have settled in well. Preet is doing well at following the other students but is very quiet and I think developing his confidence to share his ideas is going to be a big step for him. For writing we will get him to work saying a sentence about a picture e.g. The car is red. As he is not yet able to draw a picture and/or tell us about it. Curtis clearly has some good fine motor skills judging by his picture today although he had trouble telling me about his picture. I showed him what I meant and wrote a story for him. I think he will pick it up quickly. Reading recovery is going well and I now have 3 students to work with each morning. Jade is gaining a lot of confidence and I think she will begin to move quite quickly in the 1-1 environment. Tangaroa is really moving with the PM type books but then really struggles on the Ready to Reads. He is picking up spelling patterns quickly. My  relationship with Tara is just so positive and really makes life so much easier. It is so good to work with someone who is totally on the same page. We bounce ideas off each other and I think are making some real progress in our teaching practice and therefore our kids progress.

16/5/17

Cannot believe we are so far into May already. We have had 5 new students start this term. 3 new to school and 2 who have moved to our school from out of town. The latter two have just started this week and have settled in well already. We were warned about the behaviour of one who has been exposed to violence at home but so far she has been perfectly well behaved. She knows quite a bit and seems to have settled in very quickly. We have some concerns about Achilles’ speech. He is not easy to understand and we feel that we should ask the Speech Language Therapist to come in and have a look/listen. Our programmes have changed a bit already this term. Getting through writing is really hard. With so many needy writers it is tricky to see them all everyday. This week I am trying to start with the most independent group. Get them set up and started with a big focus on the planning of their writing to help add detail. They then complete their writing on their own. This is ok while the LI is around planning. However, it’s not going to work so well when the guidance is needed for different parts of the writing. I’m not getting to do reading teaching at the moment as it’s when I’m at Reading Recovery during reading time. I’m really happy with the way we are teaching Inquiry and PE at the moment. Wednesday we have a good hour of Inquiry time and Friday the same for PE. This is much better than what we have been doing previously in these areas. The kids are really motivated about the Inquiry topic at the moment. Loving learning about the Battle of the Mountains myth. We are doing some collaborative art around this to add to our mural. Tomorrow, we will also start some drama about the mountains.

30/05/17

This fortnight has seemed to be hard work. 26 little ones in class is tricky even with two teachers most of the time. Riley U starts in a couple of weeks too. We are continuing to grow independence in our kids and are expecting a lot more from our older children. Some are thriving on this expectation while others are finding it a bit tricky. I am feeling a bit run down at the moment and am not really sure why. I have forgotten a few things I was supposed to do recently and am conscious that I’m not as tolerant as I should be at times. I think it’s the wintery weather and lack of sunlight that is causing me to feel as though I am half hibernated. The majority of students seem to be continuing to progress fairly well. Some of our Year 1s are really taking off. Reading Recovery is also going well with Tangaroa ready to be tested off. I would like to contact Kylie from Rototuna again for some more advice around teaching oral language structure. I want some direction about what to focus on to build oral language and sentence structure. I am feeling anxious about what will happen once Tara has gone and really hope that the new teacher will be able to fit in well.

13/6/17

It's hard to believe we are in week 7 already. Things have been going pretty well with some good progress in all areas. We have now got reading, writing, handwriting and maths goal sheets running and these are working pretty well. They are particularly helpful with report writing and OTJs as we can easily see where kids are. The trickiest part is making sure we make the time to check in and assess goals and make new ones. I want to extend our students writing even further and am finding that really hard with so many. Even with two teachers it is near impossible to get around them all. It is going to be a totally new situation with Sarah starting and I will really have to re-think the way I'm doing things. I still have new spelling goal sheets to sort out. We haven't done as much inquiry stuff the last two weeks so we really need to get into that a bit further too. Our use of Te Reo is increasing a bit and I've been really enjoying the way Whaea Dini has been setting her lessons around the topics we have been doing in regards to te reo in our class. I went to kapahaka last week and I would love to have some access to the songs and videos they are learning in order to do some with our class to allow them to have some knowledge/experience to feel confident in the kapahaka group.

27/6/17
The term is flying. Our class is very full and some of our new students are quite tricky. We are dealing with some interesting behaviours but are making good progress with all of them. Sarah is now working along side me in the class. She has quickly cottoned on to the way we do things and isn't afraid to ask questions. She is fitting in well to the class and the students seem to like her. Some of the more challenging ones need to build more of a relationship with her yet, as they don't quite respect her enough at this point. I am finding I need to be more specific with my planning as I'm dealing with different teachers at different times. I will be collaborating with Sarah, Sue and Marie as well as Sariah and Sharee, so there's a lot of people working with these students and we all need to be on the same page. I am starting to think about what the programme for next term will look like. I will be out for 1.5hours with Reading Recovery and I need to decide when the best time for this is. I don't want to give up writing time and really feel that I no longer have a clue what is going on with the students in regards to writing. I've really enjoyed leading maths this week too. I'm wondering how I can possibly make it all work, because I don't want to give anything up! I'm wondering whether we can have a literacy time where reading and writing is running at the same time. Sarah would also like to fit R W M in before lunch.

Term 1 Reflections

28/2/17

Pretty positive start to the year. The children that can be challenges have had a good start. We have all main areas up and running fairly well. Swimming has been going well but definitely is squeezing up the other learning areas. The collaboration with Tara this term is different to last year - we are splitting/leading different areas rather than both sharing everything. This may well continue to change as our programmes develop. Reading is running well and having two teachers teaching at the same time is great. Tara is teaching maths when I am at reading recovery, so I don’t really know how that is going at the moment. Handwriting has shown drastic improvement already. Our writing programme is slowly developing but all students are writing most days. I am happy that our phonological awareness and spelling is being taught everyday. The students are picking up some of these concepts very quickly. Frustrations are around still not being clear about what data we need to be collecting when, so that we can plan ahead. Reading Recovery feels like it is slowly getting going. Roaming around the known is taking a long time especially with absences and interruptions.

14/3/17

We have found that as we meet the middle of the term we are getting tired, some things are not meeting our expectations and things have felt a bit like hard work at times. In saying that, all programmes are now running pretty smoothly. The students are following rotations well and we are getting through reading, writing and maths, as well as some Art and Social Science Inquiry stuff. Finishing swimming is really helping us get through all our work each day. We have been flexible in our timetabling and have changed things to different times of the day to make them fit. Constant conversations with Tara about what is working and what isn’t, is really helpful. I have taken a lead in getting writing running better as Tara was away for a few days and I feel like we are making some real progress. Our early writers are picking things up very quickly. Our more developed writers are beginning to extend their ideas, just through practising using different sentence structures on the mat together before writing. One of the challenges for our early writers is them having more ideas than they have the skills to write, and they don’t want to stop.

Reading is also progressing well with most students moving up a level or 2 (or 3) already. Our new students are gaining a lot of skills with their reading and I feel that some of the SEED Learning stuff from writing is coming across into their reading.

Tara is taking a lead in Maths and I have begun supporting the follow up activities. This is a great way to reinforce learning and to notice who can do the activity independently.

We have introduced goals in Reading, Handwriting and Maths but need to revisit these daily. So we can tick off what they can do. I have yet to complete making one for writing.

Reading Recovery is now going really well. T.N. is flying and ready to start being tested off. He could still work on his word writing a bit but is reading really well and can write a pretty good story with good spelling. T.C. has made heaps of progress already and I am sure he will continue to move very quickly. He is great at remembering what I told him and I don’t seem to need to repeat the same teaching over and over, just show him once or twice and move on!

Our new student is much lower than the other students and it is going to be hard to put her into a group, as even all our other newbies are quite a bit further ahead. But, she has settled in well and is trying hard, so may catch up quickly.

4/4/17

Our programme is now ticking along pretty well. We are still changing things pretty regularly in an attempt to give our students as much “teaching” time as possible and I love how flexible we can be in the way we work with out class. We have now made our middle block “literacy” time and have split the class in half. One teacher takes 4 reading groups, milk and big book while the other teacher takes the other half for writing. We then swap. This has allowed us to support our early writers much better while also extending out better writers as the group is smaller. It also means less students working on independent activities which has improved engagement and behaviour. The writing group is mixed ability and I think this is also helpful as it gives a range of models for the early writers and requires some independence from the more advanced writers.

We are now able to complete a full math rotation in the afternoon. The group’s follow up activities are supported by me after their initial lesson with Tara. This has been a great way to look at what they have mastered from the lesson. I am able to make some notes on the planning document as I work with students and make judgements about who has got the concept and still need more support. We are encouraging independence by sending the students who can do it on their own, off to finish by themselves. They can then show me and conference with me, without interrupting Tara’s next group. It is really exciting to see some quite complex concepts being understood by our students.

Mentoring online PD

Online modules to support mentors
https://maukiteako.brackenlearning.com/Live/

Traditional vs High quality mentoring

Characteristics of traditional and high quality induction and mentoring

Traditional Advice and Guidance

High Quality, Intensive Induction and Mentoring

Emotional Support §  pastoral care §  pep talks §  support, advice, guidance §  collective responsibility. Technical Support §  advice / handy tips §  focus on behaviour §  practical – mentor taking class so PRT can focus on small groups §  short-term fixes §  teaching focus §  surface issues §  hierarchical – mentor ’sorts out’ PRT issues §  mentor talks, PRT listens §  reactive §  big “whole deal” at once observation §  mini “me” scenario §  speak to the learner – teachers are ākonga. Mentor teachers §  chosen for convenience rather than skill or ‘best fit’ for the PRT §  not supported with professional learning for the role §  work in isolation with an individual teacher.

Links practice to a view of good teaching §  learning focus §  goal orientated – PRT and Mentor goal. Builds confidence by developing pedagogical expertise §  setting goals – own development §  underpinned by achievement of ākonga. Has a developmental (but not linear) view of learning to teach §  long term focus §  deeper exploration of practice and evidence of learning– and what lies behind the surface issues. Develops teacher autonomy and agency §  teacher voice §  determine next steps / take responsibility §  PRT agency involved in making decisions §  Examine / reflect on own practice §  Deeper (becoming self-regulated). Builds knowledge by using their teaching as a site of inquiry §  practice of effective pedagogy §  proactive – setting the PRT up – application of strategies. Provides planned, and takes advantage of incidental, learning opportunities §  focused and specific §  detailed observation - but selective §  mentor and PRT focused – purposeful, know what you’ll observe §  range of tools used in observation. Engages in serious professional conversations §  professional discussion – challenge pedagogy §  active listening §  explore deeper issues §  learning conversation process (partnership) §  more about mentor (listening) and their role. Bases feedback and assessment on evidence §  evidence based / interrogate data §  get PRT to think more and have evidence for what he/she is doing. School, kura or ECE service structure §  mentoring given value and importance.

Mentor Teacher

Workshops for Mentor Teachers - could be beneficial....