Wide & Deep - Critical Literacy

This week, the second week of school for the year, I began with full reading and maths programmes and groups. I wanted to hit the ground running, getting the kids into the habit of doing hard work and having to think hard everyday. 

It is a Manaiakalani recommendation that teachers include more critical literacy in their programmes. (Read University of Auckland research about Manaiakalani where these are further explained - here) as they found that is what contributed to the huge learning shift in classrooms they studied.

This recommendation includes;

Promoting engagement in reading, comprehension and higher order thinking.  

Promoting instruction for depth of understanding and independence. 

Providing in-task support for thinking about reading. 

Increasing the challenge and expectations in assigned texts and tasks. 

Making connections. 

These are the things I aimed to include in my programme this week, and on an on-going basic as well.

In class this week, we were studying one aspect of Hauora for our inquiry topic. I chose to focus on emotional well-being. 

We brainstormed different feelings we knew...

We made clines to show how some emotions are related to each other, but might be less or more severe than others. We used our prior knowledge (the brainstorm we made, above) and then added to them with help from here. 

(This became a huge vocabulary building task, which was awesome!)

We chose emotions (in groups) and acted our scenarios of what that looked like/caused it/felt like etc.

Each reading group had 1 story at their appropriate curriculum level to read and work on, an online article to support the ideas in the follow up work, and then they read a second story above their level. So each student read at least 3 stories, with the theme of emotions, at different levels of complexity, within one week.

Here are two students completed follow up for their first story - remember they are only 9 and 10 years old! I was blown away with their thinking about emotions. Year 5 student.  Year 6 student.

On Friday morning, after everything we had done about emotions this week. We had a discussion. I asked all the students to bring one of their stories with them. 

We went through each story, and one of the students volunteered to explain (to those who hadn't read it) what the story was about, who the characters were, what happened that made them emotional and what emotions they felt. It was way easier to get them talking in this way than I expected it to be - I thank myself for forcing them to speak in front of each other last week so they got over the fear! The students added onto what each other was saying quite a lot, which was amazing because it showed they had a good understanding of their 3 stories and could add more detail, or ask questions of each other, and that they felt comfortable enough as group members to respond to each other so casually and in a supportive way.

We compared the stories, the characters, the emotions they felt. We connected with what work we had done earlier in the week (which was already displayed in the class!). 

Then I asked them this question ..

Do you control your emotions, or do they control you? 

They pretty much all instantly said that they were in control of their emotions. I challenged them (after explaining that I wasn't disagreeing with them, I wanted them to defend their opinion or think from another point of view), by saying,

 what about when you get angry, and you lash out and punch someone or something, are you still in control of your emotions then? 

They sat for a bit.. I could tell they hadn't thought of it that way. Then one student (who gets angry often, ironically) said that when that happens, your emotions are in control of you. The rest of the class slowly started nodding and realising what I meant. 

We came to the agreement that sometimes we are in control of our emotions, and sometimes, they are in control of us. One student pointed out that when you get angry and do something, that's when your emotions are in control, and then afterwards you feel guilty, that's when you are in control again and you feel bad for what you did, but you also feel bad for loosing control. I was quite impressed with that!

I asked them who they thought was in control, when you wake up from a scary dream sweating and shaking and feeling nervous and paranoid. They all agreed that your emotions were in control of your body, even though you were sleeping. Being scared in the dream causes those physical reactions (we had also talked about physical reactions earlier in the week).

This led us on a tangent about emotions and dreams. I was in awe at how easily the students shared very personal stories, about dreams and/or experiences they had had and how it made them feel, including the death and funeral of family members, the still birth of cousins etc. Heavy stuff! 

What surprised me was it was mostly my new students, rather than the ones I taught last year and have again, that shared the most. I felt proud I had established such rapport with them so quickly so that they were comfortable to share these stories. I wanted to respect their vulnerability and reciprocate it, to let them know it was okay to share and we could trust each other, so I shared a personal story as well. My story was about how when my sister was in labour with my nephew, I woke up at a particular time after a dream that something went wrong with the birth and that my sister had to have an emergency C-section. The next morning when my sister rang to tell us the baby was born, it turned out she had her C-section at the exact minute I woke up. Freaky huh? This encouraged the kids to keep sharing and feel safe, and also led to another tangent of explaining what a C-section was (lol). 

The discussion was so powerful and I'm so delighted I decided to do it. 

The conversation was so rich, not only about the books we had read, the content of these stories (funerals, what a drought was, metaphorical drought when you ignore your emotions, how milk gets delivered, how petrol is stored at petrol stations, why weka birds walk funny, how kids can feel left out in adult conversations, where rain comes from, why you get big bags under your eyes when you are tired, etc etc etc.) but about emotions and our personal experiences. We connected our inquiry, reading and writing so seamlessly. 

I definitely want to keep trying to do these things - 

Promoting engagement in reading, comprehension and higher order thinking.  

Promoting instruction for depth of understanding and independence. 

Providing in-task support for thinking about reading. 

Increasing the challenge and expectations in assigned texts and tasks. 

Making connections.

However one thing I want to change is to make my follow up activities smaller, and have one for each story, rather than one big one for only one story. Also including more 'create' in the tasks now that the students know the Chromebook expectations. A third thing I want to do differently next week is getting the kids from group A to read aloud to group B, group B to read aloud to group C etc, rather than only to their own group. Some of my kids are very slow and hesitant readers and I think the mileage (and feedback from their peers) will help them improve.

Onwards and upwards!