2017

Wow it's hard to believe that 2017 has come around already!

Things to recap at this point:

Collaborative learning, New School Organisation, Deliberate Acts of Teaching, Digital Assessment to Support Math and Writing Development.

Collaborative Learning:
This has been awesome!  I'm so enjoying working with other people; bouncing ideas off each other, sharing successes and challenges, and getting to know the kids together.  I love that we're going about this process slowly, getting to know each other and undertake collaboration within curriculum areas one at a time.  At the moment we're more cooperating than collaborating for maths, but I think we'll evolve as time goes on.  This will present a bit of a challenge in maths around Student Learning Conferences... so we'll need to think about that.  Best practice would suggest that we should all be seeing the kids all of the time, so it will be interesting to try to work out out to do that.

New School Organisation
Glen and Herman and I had a productive and exciting meeting today, deciding on what our direction could be next for e-Learning.  My focus will be on how to integrate e-Learning with our other curriculum areas.  Now that our Learning Pathways etc are all up and running, it's going to be an exciting thing to work through.  I've started already and it would be amazing to design some samples that students could work their way through and track their own progress.  I'm also looking forward to designing an independent programme for our extension writers that would be motivating and personalized.


Deliberate Acts of Teaching
It was great to have this really spelled out in our Team Meeting today.  Many of these things we do already, but it was great to be able to talk through them, reading and sharing back on a section each.  I really enjoyed our Team Meeting Time being more about professional learning and less about the admin stuff which I could read myself.

The link to the TKI site where the Deliberate Acts of Teaching are covered is here

Digital Assessment to Support Math and Writing Development
This has been quite fun.  I'm trying to design some quite simple formative assessments that cover many of the aspects that our writers struggle with often and use this to support writing and maths.  Now that I have a clearer direction around our e-learning roles, I'm wanting to integrate that too.  It will be really cool to see how it comes together.  I'm hoping that it can be run quite simply and that I can find ways of putting HyperDocs together so that these can stem from our Learning Pathways.  This will help us to personalise the kids' learning.

It's been a busy term so far, but with camp and assessments done, it's really awesome now to begin to get down to some targeted needs-based group teaching. The kids are much more settled and I'm really enjoying my time with them.

Modelling books

Loving modelling books this year! So fun working with enthusiastic kids!

Inquiry Learning: Reading and Math Successes

Wow what awesome learning we've been engaging in lately!


Reading:
The Book Whisperer is teaching me about how important it is that our kids love reading.  That we build that enthusiasm for reading and that a huge part of building that enthusiasm has to do with NOT... KILLING... THE ..... PASSION.  We do that by NOT going overboard on the written work kids have to complete after they've read a great story.  This lead me to an article on:
5 Ways to enhance reading by Reading Rockets and one of them was about recording what kids are reading on documents and adding their page number.

Trying some strategies - reading log record
This was amazing!  We read and I set the kids the challenge of reading 100,000 pages before the end of the year.  And when our silent reading started, it was so quiet!  So quiet!  The kids were focused and the time passed so quickly!  At the end, we shared page numbers and I told the kids a bit about the book I was reading and we started talking about what a gift that we give others when we 'sell' a book to them.  I wished in hindsight that I'd recorded the conversation because it was so powerful.  We talked about how brave we are when we read and how sometimes when we don't, we are scared.  We're scared of not being able to read.  We're scared of not understanding. We're scared we'll find another book we don't love.  We're scared of how we'll look.
And the kids who shared....?  They were all kids who have either been reading texts far beneath them or they have been kids who didn't love reading.  And they were all so excited about finding a text they loved.  And they shared how they don't really like reading but now much they were surprised by the enjoyment of what they were reading!  And so we coloured their names gold..... because it was gold that they'd shared, and gold that they'd persevered and been brave enough to be vulnerable and share back that they have been someone who doesn't love reading.

Success Starters is something else I've been learning about.
On page 49 of the book "Learning in the Fast Lane" it says:
"Success starters vary lesson by lesson.  As compelling and riveting as possible, these activities spark authentic involvement rather than compliance."

I love this idea.  This is where we go wrong.  School has often been about compliance.  I know one of the keys to encouraging reading in our classrooms is taking the compliance out of it and increasing the relevance and authenticity of it.

Going back to the text, there are a number of Success Starters including role playing, surveys, predictions, questioning, question cards, brainstorm (splash-sort-label),



Math:
Games - Fractions, Decimals, Percentages Relay
Individual attention - morning tea times with MathsGirl

Innovative Learning Environments: