Shared Reading and social Consciousness

This Term, in the first few weeks we have had eight new enrolments in our class. We wanted to make them feel at home and also wanted to know about all of them. We decided to do this through shared reading.
We chose to read "Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street".






It is very important to celebrate every students culture in the class and acknowledge what they bring with them. The text that we had chosen was a perfect pick.

After reading the text we asked students wrote their stories about Tuna coming to Tamaki Primary and bringing things that were valuable in their culture. One of the stories that a student wrote read:

'The Tuna with the magical korokoro jumped out of Tamaki river, went on to Alamein road and came to Tamaki Primary school. It came to me and opened it's waha wide. I pulled out a piupiu. I wore the piupiu and began to kanikani.'
by- Joshua

Everyone used words from their languages to describe their item.
The next day students got lavalavas, piupius, pois and other traditional clothes from home. We took photos and made a class shared book about the magical tuna coming to our school.

This was a very powerful, engaging lesson. Building on students life experiences, talking and learning to read and write about their lives and their cultures was very empowering. All students were engaged and wanted to share and show off about their little things that they had brought to school.
Current real world examples help students connect to the curriculum, allow for deeper engagement and help students make their connections with individual and global identities.
A classroom can definitely be a space for students to develop and explore their social consciousness.

Co- Teaching

The first week was a great week in Terms of PLD. We have Paula Were for Literacy and I shadowed her for co - teaching sessions in the junior classes. These were awesome lessons as I got to see the practice of different teachers and also got an opportunity to work with the students who are in different classes. Teachers gained a lot through these sessions and everyone enjoyed teaching and learning. We talked about how to bring cultures of the students into classroom and how this would bring more engagement. We also talked about how we need to move on from what students already know and how to breakdown WALTS into smaller learning Intentions so that they are achievable.

I personally believe that co- teaching is the best way to do PLDs as we teachers learn from one another. It is where the teachers co-teach along side one another and share responsibility for planning, teaching and assessing. It is a way of supporting teachers where one teacher takes the lead and the other supports the students and then rotate their roles. It is a non- threatening way of supporting teachers where you are not judged on how you teach.  It is all about a practice where we all are responsible for the student learning, including the Principal, Curriculum Leader, Team leaders and the class-Teacher. It is about how we all can improve student achievement.

I feel that one session is not enough to bring desirable outcomes. We need to collaborate and do co- teaching more often and bring real fun into teaching and learning.

When do we do Science?

When do we do Science was a question that my BT (Ashley) asked at our syndicate meeting.
I thought about it and instantly knew the answer to it. Because it was the End of the Term and there were lots of things to complete on my mind, I could never get a chance to talk to Ashley about the question she had asked.
This Term we have been studying about 'Whare Tapa Wha' and 'The School values'. Though we did a lot about all our  five school values and researched how we could make these values visible in the school, we had also touched on the science bit through the values of 'Whanaungatanga and Ako'.

We had seen that most of our students brought sugary drinks to school along with their lunch packs. I wanted to discourage unhealthy drinks within my class and wanted them to start getting water bottles to school. For this we started our little water campaign where students were encouraged to drink water other than sugary drinks. To make this campaign comprehensive, students researched about how water was important for our bodies and also read lots of texts about places where water was scarce. We made posters and then our class led to educating other classes about why water was important for our bodies.

So here was our little integration with science into our unit. Hopefully Ashely will read this blog post and will have her questions answered.  But I do agree with you Ashley that we need to look into our units and have a complete inquiry based on a science topic.

Creating Classroom Culture

Today was the End of Term 1 and when I look back I think Ashley and myself  have done a lot of things together. But the one that stands out the most is developing a culture of the classroom where everyone is safe to share their ideas. I wanted an environment of trust and acceptance in which students are empowered and feel comfortable to share their ideas with the rest of their mates and their class teachers without being shy or embarrased. Ashley picked up this idea very quickly when she saw me doing the class Treaty that spoke about how to be a team.
Our classroom Treaty is all about how we work together because I strongly believe that behaviour does not remain an issue if there is lots of teaching and learning happening in a class. Bad behaviour sublimes when students are focussed and are intrinsically motivated to achieve their goals. So from the very beginning we talked about what a good team looks like and that if we were  a good team then we would support one another in learning and would also celebrate each others success.

It was obvious that we would make lots of mistakes when learning new things but our mistakes were our opportunities to learn. In the beginning students were a little hesitant to share their ideas. Ashley saw me using the class treaty as a tool to encourage and remind students about achieving  their goals and trying their best. She quickly imbibed this style into her own teaching and took it a bit further into growth mindsets.

 I feel that now our students are more reflective and nonjudgemental if someone makes a mistake. They are developing habits where they are learning to listen to what others say and respect each other's opinion and feelings. I am happy that our classroom is continuously becoming a safe place to explore new ideas and share our thinking about our everyday learning.

Group worthy questions

This Term Sue Pine our facilitator for Maths has shown us how group worthy questions can be a great tool to encourage mathematical discussions among students. So Last week I gave group worthy open ended questions to my class.
The question was - There are some bears and they are going to the picnic in cars. Five bears can fit in a car. How many bears are going to the picnic.
There was lots of thinking, discussion and working out of problems using different numbers.  They drew their understanding of the problem on the paper. But as they became confident, they started enjoying solving problems and asked me to give them some pictures of cars. To my surprise they started to make their own questions using their pictures.
Initially,  students started by skip counting in fives and then slowly worked out their way to find answers to problems involving bigger numbers. For example 100 bears can go in 20 cars so 115 bears will go in 3 more cars and that makes a total of 23 cars. Language associated with multiplication like 'groups of' or 'time'  all became very clear to the students and the best thing was that they all taught each other how to solve the problems. it was a great lesson and I felt a very happy teacher. This is what students did in groups to solve the problems.

Number Talks

Number Talks were introduced to us by our Maths facilitator, Sue Pine. These are extremely easy to do and are of an immense value to our daily Maths programme. My co- teacher Ashley and myself devote 10 minutes of our Maths time to number talks everyday. During this time students are asked to work out a problem mentally in their head. It is interesting to find how students derive their answers. It gives an insight into what strategies students are able to use and how efficiently. It is always good to visually represent the different methods used by students as this allows them to learn  other strategies from one another and also allows students to show their mathematical thinking.

Here is what we did in our class to introduce number talks.
We asked our students what do knew about the 1/2.  The answers that we got are in the picture below.

Here is a video  from Jo Boaler that will facilitate the idea of Number talks further.

Reading Together

I have been doing the Reading Together Programme for a few years at my school now. But this time

was a  very different experience for me. I had one very keen Burmese family attend the programme. Both Mum and Dad know very little English. They can hardly converse in English and when I was talking about the effective ways of reading to kids I could see that both the parents were not understanding what I was saying. They have children who are 7 and 6 years old. When it was time to read with the children, I thought that it would be very hard for the parents to read for their kids. But to my surprise Mum started reading slowly and asked her son to read alongside her so that they both could read together. When they came across a difficult word the whole family tried to sound it out and then they read and re-read to make sense of the text. They collectively read the story and enjoyed it. If they all got stuck on the word, they would ask us. It is very rare to see such kind of enthusiasm. We all were  amazed and definitely inspired as they set an example for the rest of us.