Teaching Writing in my Class

I had my literacy observation recently and one of the  criteria is to record our lesson and then analyse the  lesson with a critical buddy. My critical buddy is Paula Were who does PLD for Writing at our school.

My goals from my last observation were-

Specific development of vocabulary eg clines

Continue building power words

Seeking the very best choice to avoid ‘over blown’ language

I not only wanted to achieve the above goals as a teacher but also wanted my students to to achieve their goals to become better writers. The group that I am teaching is  mixed ability group and their goals are to write interesting stories in order to create impact on their audience. To achieve this goal they have the following Success Criteria-

• Use detail for ideas
• Use correct punctuations
• Use Powerful words and similes
• Use dialogue
• use emotive language

Connections with Reading and writing

To start the lesson I made connections to the text that they had read the previous day.

I drew their attention to the new words and phrases they had read in text. I made sure that they understood the meanings of all the new vocabulary so that it becomes easy for them to use these in their writing.

Global Connections

The picture prompt that I used was that of a roller coaster. This was because I wanted to make connections with the recent incident that happened at Dream world.

Specific development of vocabulary

Most of my students use simple words in their writing or else they may use overblown words that really do not make much sense. To help them use specific vocabulary I made clines.

Making connections with culture

After explaining the word cline I asked my students if they could make any cultural connections to the roller coaster. It is important that we acknowledge and cherish what our students bring with them. In this case the students said that the roller coaster looked like a Taniwha, an eel, a huge wave or a whale, a dragon's tail and a tunnel.

I reminded students several times about their goals and gave them hints on how they could transfer the new words learnt to their writing.  Here is what they produced in about 5 minutes.

Revisiting Learning intentions and success criteia
To sum up students read their stories to each other and checked to see if their friends had met the success criteria. Next, students checked if they had achieved their goals. They checked this with their buddies and then ticked against the success criteria if they had achieved them.

Follow up task

A follow up task was to ask students to highlight detail, powerful words, dialogue and emotive words in a text on roller coasters. This was a winding off activity that would help them to remember their goals. Here is the text that was given.

To sum up students read their stories to each other and checked to see if their friends had met the success criteria. Next, students checked if they had achieved their goals. They checked this with their buddies and then ticked against the success criteria if they had achieved them.

Reflection and feedback - The feedback that I got from my critical friend was very good. To sum up she said that the connections with the reading and writing, culture and student goals were very elegantly done.

Link to my plan for the above lesson

Science Week - Collaborative teaching

What is the power of two in class? Anne Sinclaire often refers to this and I saw this happening beautifully in my class when Ashley decided she wanted to do something in Science. I agreed as I like to do things in science and I also wanted ashley to lead this lesson as she is approaching more towards the end of her collaborative teaching. It also reminds me of what we were asked at the beginning of the year before we had MDTA's in our class.



What is the one most important thing you need to establish at the beginning of the MDTA programme?

• Building relationships with the students
• Establishing the MDTA teacher as a teacher who is in equal partnership with the mentor teacher and not in a student teacher type role.
• Mentor teacher letting go of control and trusting the MDTA teacher with classroom responsibilities and listening to their ideas.

So this week we learnt about the functions of different parts of the body.

This term we have have been learning about how to keep ourselves safe and one of the extensions into the safety inquiry was to make sure that we keep our bodies and the organs of our body safe too.

First we learnt about the functions of the parts of the body. We talked in detail how drugs, smoking and junk food could harm the organs of our body and how we could not be able to learn and be strong individuals.

It was great to see how all children were interested to find out about the organs. Some of the facts like the liver produces acid and that there are 206 bones in our body and that our heart works non- stop till we live etc amazed our kids.

Then Paula Were our literacy PLD lady introduced us to an app. It is known as Anatomy 4D. It is an amazing app and our kids were awed by it.

Then we started to make a model showing the internal organs of our body. This was hard work! and my lovely Ashley (MTDA) became a little stressful!

There was heaps of laminating, cutting, gluing and stapling. Besides some students lost some of the organs that were needed to complete the model. So Both me and Ashley were found saying things like " Where is your heart?" " Did you cut your kidney?" " What happened to the intestine?" " Have you got your lungs?" etc. Usually it became very quiet hilarious.

Finally Ashley made a movie on the functions of parts of the body.

The whole experience was very rewarding both for the kids and their teachers.

One of the outcomes that was a highlight for me was that Ashley led the lesson and the two of us helped the students make their models of bodies. All this would not have happened if the the power of the two was missing.

Finding Fractions of a Region - Language of Maths

After doing two weeks of fractions in my class I felt that most students in the class would be comfortable halving and quartering fractions of a region. So I decided to work with my students who are achieving low in Maths.


To my surprise, none of the five students could show me the different ways we could share a cake into quarters. I felt very disappointed.

The question that I gave them was this:

I also gave them a square piece of paper that they could experiment to work out quarters. But somehow it did not seem to work. None of students seemed confident to ask questions or talk about their thinking.

As I started to explain the problem I realised that my students did not have the language to participate in a discussion. So I stopped teaching to the plan and decided to expose my students to the language that was required to participate in a discussion. I used think boards so that each child could record their understanding.

After remembering, repeating and discussing the question a number of times, the students had the words to explain their understanding.

Tomorrow I will be giving an different problem on quarters to the same group of students and hopefully they will understand and be able to solve the problem.

Today instead of giving another problem to the same group, I made them experts and they had to share their learning in a group.  All the students explained and demonstrated the different ways they could share a cake in quarters. They did it beautifully and that was because they had the language to explain their thinking. It built their confidence and left them motivated towards their learning.

In future I will make sure that each child in the class has the words to explain their thinking. It becomes all the more important when most of my students have english as their second language.

Film Festival

Each Year The Manaiakalani school participate in a film festival. in this festivals movies made by students are shown in Hoytts cinemas at Sylvia park. This years festival is on 12th November 2014.  I have up loaded two of my movies to have a feel about the festival. For more information visit the website given below.


  https://sites.google.com/a/ptengland.school.nz/film-festival-2011/home
A better tomorrow 1 from Tamaki Primary on Vimeo.
zoo film from Tamaki Primary on Vimeo.https://sites.google.com/a/ptengland.school.nz/film-festival-2011/home

Digital environment and Student engagement

These days there is a big buzz about digital classrooms and it’s benefits. I teach in a year 3-4 class and belong to the Manaikalani Cluster of schools. I do not have a full net book class but we do have
5 i-pads and 5 netbooks along with a couple of computers. My class is a base for students where they learn their basic skills to be able to work in a complete digital environment when they become year 5 students.

As I have challenging students in my class my total focus was to engage every students in deep learning to be successful. Having the digital tools and learning how to use these tools was new for me. I set off by making a class website. This is where I do all my planning. Each day we start our day by visiting the class website that I project on the classroom T.V. screen. All groups look at what they have done and what they need to do to complete all the tasks assigned to them for the week. Slowly I noticed that my students started to visit the class website themselves to guide their learning. It was very encouraging to hear some of my students say to each other “ Don’t go to Miss if you have finished your writing, go to the site to see what you have to do next”.  Now this I think,  is the first step to be a self- driven, self- motivated learner.

Experiencing the change with net books and blogs was immense. Though we do not have one on one net books for everyone in class, I have been able to make learning possible at home and in weekends by making my class website accessible to everyone, anywhere. Some students who do not have computers, visit the local library to keep up to date with their learning.

I feel engaged and self motivated in my search for innovative ways to teach my students through a presentation or a screen recording. And I can do this in the comforts of my home. It has also cut hugely on continuous delivery of lesson by the real teacher in class. A group of students visit the class site to find what they have to do next. While this group is engaged in their learning, I have the time to do group conference with other students who need more of my attention. I also feel that to some extent, I have been able to engage families as they can now see what their children are learning at school.

A few more netbooks for Year 3 and 4 class would be my wish come true.

Working in a digital environment class has proved to be truly thriving, innovative and productive for my students.