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.