28/9/17

This term has flown by. We have had some hard behaviours to deal with and I have had a lot of extra work and stress from outside work or additional learning that I have been doing. I'm glad that I am now experienced enough to go with the flow and not stress about having to change tact. I can prioritise what I need to do and ensure that my students are still getting the attention they need.

The term has disappeared and it's easy to feel like we haven't moved students on enough. But looking at their results it seems that we are making some good progress for most of them. Our new ones need some more targeted learning around the initial skills for literacy and numeracy and I am planning ways to ensure this happens next term.

Looking ahead to next term we have some challenges to work through. We have a new student arriving who is high behaviour needs and will have full time teacher aide support. This is going to mean we need to look very carefully how to structure our day, room and lessons.

Elklan debrief

This term I've had the great opportunity to attend the Elklan Language Builders course. Tonight was the last session and I have taken a lot away from it. I've found that most of it was stuff I already knew was important but it has been reiterated with really practical ideas to implement it. I've got new strategies to try to develop language at all levels. I've got some baselines for what students should be doing with their language at different ages and therefore when you should be looking at an intervention.

The biggest thing that has been reiterated is just how important these base skills are before students can be expected to read and write successfully. As a consequence of this I'd really like to complete some teacher inquiry around this area. I plan to start with a group next term where I have a much larger focus on learning phonological awareness, building oral language, reading to, handwriting, story telling/sequencing, letter-sound knowledge rather than actual reading and writing texts.
I am thinking of creating shared stories about experiences that they've had or repeated reading of simple books for them to take home.

Next year I would like to start my class off with only phonological, oral language, reading to, handwriting, storytelling/sequencing and letter-sound knowledge with no readers or written text for possibly the first term. I think it will be extremely interesting to see how these students track compared to this year's cohort after 1 year at school.
Challenges I think I will face in convincing parents that it's ok for their students not to be bringing home readers every day. Also our term 1 data would look poor as students will not be achieving running records or writing sample results. I also wonder at what point to I move children on. If they have very good phonological awareness and oral language do I put them into more formal reading and writing more quickly. Do I need an assessment that determines when they move into the more formal work or do I go off a gut feeling and then how do I manage it?

Currently I am trying to do everything  - and I can't fit it all in. So I think this will be much better.

I've now also got a few students that I would like to refer to SLT as I know recognise that they may need some specialised help. The challenge is that we currently don't have a full time SLT and often they give us more to do and it's very hard to fit it all in.

Target Student Feedback

Austin

Difficulties
Remembering his story
Hearing the end sounds in words
Recognising sight words

What has worked
Phonological focus
Daily letter sound spelling work
Repeating sentence in writing over and over before writing
Instruction writing was really successful
Has pretty much got spacing sorted now. Not really sure what has helped that to click except that his reading has really improved.


Suggestions
Memory games
- touch the ....., ......, .......
- three objects and cover them up what were they