Manaiakalani Class On Air lesson # 5

I teach in a school that is situated in low socio economic community. Some students who start school come with an oral language of a three year old. This creates a big gap between them and the students who come form affluent backgrounds. Language acquisition is one of the major concerns for our community. 
This year I have been exposing my students to texts that are abundant in language and have trained them to notice words and word groups that make a text captivating.  Students understand and learn meanings of these new words and then try and use the new words and word groups to tell the story in their own language. Through this lesson I have tried to show the process of how we do this in our class.




Click here to watch the complete episode on Manaiakalani Google Class on Air.

The News Board

In the beginning of the term I bought a big white board from the warehouse and placed it in the corner of my room for students to write what they wanted to share with the class. I modelled for them by sharing my story. It was exciting! everyone wanted to read what I had to say. All I was trying to achieve was to have them write for real audience. Slowly students started taking turns to write any story they wanted to share.
With time, the white board has become very popular. Everyone wants to say something! The focus is still on using clever chunks and delightful words, new vocabulary, phrases and the effort is on how we can write ideas in a better way so that our audience gets lots of information about our news.
When there is news item on the board, students look for describing words and circle them using with another coloured pen. It has turned into a kind of a competition. They have created their own rule to decide which story is the best. The rule is - the story with most describing words is the best. I don't know how this works and I sometimes feel that I need to shift their focus from just describing words to other aspects of good writing too, but I do not want to kill the enthusiasm by having too many technical details.
The part that excites me the most is when students feedback each other and suggest words that could be used to make the story sound better. This involves a lot of editing and crafting. It is also helping in developing a culture where children are readily beginning to provide feedback to their peers on our writing topics. The most challenging subject is beginning to become fun in my class.

My Inquiry at the End of Term 1

At the end of term one, as I was sifting through my inquiry, I made notes of the major changes/ inputs that I have made this term to improve writing of my students. So what  have been the major focuses-

1. Vocabulary - I introduced new vocabulary every time we wrote. This was very carefully built on the existing knowledge of the children so it they could hold on to their new learning. This vocabulary is carefully chosen so that it is on the edge which will enhance their language potential.

2. Moving away from WALTs - I no longer talk about WALTs and Success criteria as these push children to focus only on one aspect of Writing. Instead I have started using a check list that guides students to make sure that they have followed the norms of writing.

3. Supporting children to use newly learnt words in various contexts - I do this by reminding, reiterating and encouraging them to use new words in their oral and written language.

4. Oral Paragraphs - Encouraging children to talk about things, situations and topic in detail. this has helped in moving them away from single word or a simple sentence descriptions to meatly, juices detailed explanations and descriptions. This has also helped in developing paragraph capability where they are required to express well developed ideas.

5. A clear understanding of topics that drives the expression of language - I develop field knowledge and talk about the real purpose of writing and who the audience would be. This encourages children to write in detail about a given topic.

Self Regulated Learning

One of the things that I want my students to do was to write well. Most of the students in my class write a simple story that needs detail, dialogue and other conventions of a good writer. If they focus on one aspect they tend to forget the other and so it has till now been a tedious task of proof reading, checking and reminding of what good writers do. I wanted them to be more self regulated when learning and producing their writing.

So today I started by asking them to brainstorm ideas about everything that makes a good writer. We needed a lot of reminding and talking before we could remember all the things that we had learnt to be good at writing. This is what they said in their first attempt of brainstorm.

Sharing ideas

During sharing time I realised that some students did not understand the aspects very clearly. They needed to be shown how to achieve each of the goals, e.g. - If the aspect was - 'Good writers plan their stories before writing' - I asked them questions like - What does this look like? What do we do when we plan our stories? Do we use planning/graphic organisers? Do we write specific words that we will use in our stories...etc. can you remember when you planned for your writing? What did you do when you were planning?

It was a great to see students discuss each task in their groups and clarify their understanding with each other.

Create

At the end of our discussion I asked students to create something that would remind them and their peers about their goals. This is what they came up with...

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