Inquiry 2018 - My journey up to now

Reflections and tweaks in my Practice - CoL

What have I learnt from my initial efforts?

My End of Term Data shows that

• All Year 4 students are all on track to reach the curriculum level at the end of the year for Reading and Writing
• All Year 4 students had made considerable shifts in writing. ( Shift of One whole year in the first two terms)
• Year 5 students had made some shifts but not as much as I had predicted in Writing.
• Why is this so?

The data was very encouraging but also reflected some grey areas that pushed me harder to reflect on my practice. What was happening in the world of my year 5 students?

• All my target students were year 4 students whom I visited more often that others. this was because initially, at the beginning of the year I had realised that most of my year 4 students were very low in literacy. So I had chosen them to be my target students. But I taught the same thing to everyone in class.

Theory says that what works for your target students will work for others in class.

But as Rebecca explained...is now making sense to me.

Another glaring reflection!

Topic specific vocabulary size increased for all my students.

This is because I laid a lot of emphasis on subject vocabulary.

But children need other kind of vocabulary too...

How can I now hurry up and refine my planning and teaching?

What changes will I make?

• In Term 3 my whole class will be a target for writing - I cannot afford to leave anyone behind!
• Hit on vocabulary in all curriculum areas - Reading, writing and Maths. Now that students understand the importance of learning new words and use these in their everyday repertoire, It would be easy to target vocabulary in all curriculum areas. This will also increase the intensity of teaching of vocabulary. I reckon it will be very engaging for students because they have already got into the habit of noticing new words and phrase in texts.
• Make space in weekly plans to revisit all new words and use them in different contexts to recycle them. (So that there is more input)
• Make sure this gets transferred into writing.
• Talk to the students about what has happened and why we need to make this change.

Reflection - What I was doing was good and has shown improvement. I need to make sure that I take all my students in stride, share their data with them, explain where they are and what they need to do to reach their goals and change my planning a bit so that I provide that space and time which my students need so compellingly to make the shifts happen. After all language acquisition is all about

 " Planning Preparing and providing"

T3 Wk 1 - My most exciting teaching moment this week

Remember what my students said after collaboratively working so hard on developing a shared book about Easter. They said "The book we write will never get printed. It will just stay in class for us to read. We write it and we read it."
To make them understand that the book will still be important, I had to borrow a fabric book that never got printed but was of great use for three generations in a family.

Click here to read my previous post

Later in the term we wrote another book about Matariki. While learning about Matariki, we came to a provocation. " Matariki should be a public holiday in New Zealand".
During the course of our study, we wrote a letter to the Prime Minister saying that we strongly voted for Matariki to be a public holiday.

Here is the letter that we sent to Jacinda Arden.

Hon. Prime Minister,

We in Room 6 are learning about Matariki, the Maori New Year. Through our surveys we have realised that many people do not know about Matariki and a lot of young Maori children do not know much about it.

Can we make Matariki a public holiday because Aotearoa is a Maori land and all people living in New Zealand should know about it.

During Matariki, we have to have whanau time. We could make bonfires, pay respect to mother Earth, remember our ancestors and wish good fortune to everyone. We fly kites and make special kai (food) to honour the cluster of seven stars. It is also the time to harvest our crops.

This takes a lot of time and so we would appreciate if the New Moon Day in the month of June is recognised as a public holiday.

Matariki should also be celebrated in the city so that people from other cultures, who live in New Zealand, can learn about Matariki. It should be recognised as an important New Zealand festival.

We have attached a report of two surveys as evidence to support our ideas.

Kind Regards

Room 6

Tamaki Primary school.

My class as usual forgot about it during the holidays. I was hoping and waiting and praying to receive a reply so that my students could have an experience of real audience for their writing. If I do not receive a reply, my student's belief that no one cares about what they write in class would get firmer.

During the holidays we did receive a response to our email. It read as follows...

My students jumped out of joy to receive this letter.

I took this opportunity to draw my student's attention to how writing can attract audience and why learning to write was an important skill. My students are so motivated to write now. They check their work several times to make sure their writing makes sense. They are intrinsically motivated to write for a variety of audience. They consult and craft their writing again and again to insert better words and sentences that will leave an impact on their readers. They make sure that they write in detail so that their audience do not miss on information. 

What else do I need? I am just enjoying the bliss of the moment!