CoL Update (Term 3, Week 7)

CoL Update

This week has been crazy as it was Tongan language week, however a couple key things I can talk about are 1) my first social story and 2) moving up reading levels.

Social stories are something I learnt about from Donna Ryan  at a PD session a while ago. The PD session was about visual aids in the classroom, but she mentioned social stories because they are visual aids to help children understand what to do in a social situation. They can be made about ANYTHING. The one I felt was necessary to make was 'how to sit on the mat', as Ryan often struggles to do this in what could be called the 'expected' way. 

I explained to my class that I wanted them to pose for pictures and not to worry about why, so they were happy to do so. (Thank you 10 year old photographer!)

Then I made the social story.

It was simple and easy to make, and I kept the 'instruction-ey' part simple. The pictures show what the words describe. 

My plan is to give this to Ryan during mat time to help him remember what he should be doing and manage himself. I find that I am almost constantly asking him to turn around, sit down, face the front etc. 

Don't get me wrong - I understand and acknowledge that sometimes he isn't able and ready to do these things and that is okay. But sometimes he is ready and able, so needs a gentle reminder. 

Also because I am aware of the social precariousness of 10 year old boys, I have made 5 copies of this social story and will give them to anybody who needs a reminder. That way Ryan doesn't feel targeted or picked on in any way. I will only give it to students when they need a reminder - not giving it to them straight away and assuming they won't/can't do it. Only when they need it.

Another highlight of this week was that I rejigged my reading boxes. I have these tubs to store colour-wheel level books for Paul and Kian (and another ESOL student who I have mentioned a couple times). Previously, these started at Level 9-10 (blue) and went through to Level 21-22 (Gold). I finally decided that if Kian is going to move I kinda have to force him. Due to his learning differences, he has been sitting around levels 10-15 for the past few years. He moves up, slides backwards over the holidays, moves up again, slides backwards, etc etc. He is currently reading Orange books (Level 15-16) with me at 'guided' level, and was reading level 9-14 for independent reading. However, he wasn't really doing any independent reading. The books that go home come back unread and he refuses (due to confidence) to read to anybody but me or Paul in class. Hence, I got rid of the level 9-14 tubs and he is now going to only be reading orange or higher. There are a mixture of types of books to give variety (and level of complexity, as PM books and sunshine books are different even though they are graded at the same level). I really want to challenge him and build his confidence so he can and will read these books. He is capable of it and I want him to see that. When I explained that I was going to get rid of the blue/green books and he was only going to read orange, he didn't really care. So no opposition! 

I put in Level 23-26 books with the spare 2 containers I know have. Even though I only moved Paul a few weeks ago onto Level 21, he can pretty much read them first time, independently, so hence I am not challenging him enough. 

Paul (and the other ESOL student) read with me both together and separately, and they will read to and with other students as well. They get a lot of mileage because of this. 

For Paul, this participation and contribution, and be willing to work with others in different ways and in different contexts has really accelerated his learning. 

CoL Update (Term 3, Week 4)

 What did I do this week?

This week I used my CRT day to prepare resources for my literacy and maths target groups, but also for ‘The A team’ which includes Kian and Paul. I prepared targeted activities or tools as to where they are at and what they need to work on.

For Kian and Paul, this includes blends (to help them sound out longer words easier) and tenses (mainly the difference between current and past tense).

Blends flip book - we are going to do a couple pages per day, saying and writing any words that start with or have that blend in them. For the third member of the A team (not Kian or Paul), pronunciation is a big issue so we are going to sound out each word and practice how to say the blend lots and lots of times.

Loop game for current/past tense.

Loop game for initial sounds and blends.

Blends flash cards.

Paul - relating to others/participating and contributing

Kian - managing self

Paul and Kian have loved the blends flip books, although Kian decides he "can't" write using a pencil but still sits and listens to us practising the words, then writes them in later anyway. The blends with three letters (e.g. scr) were difficult for Paul to pronounce and he is still having small issues with p/b sounds, but a HUGE improvement all round.

We met together and went through blends three times this week, on top of me reading with them and them reading with others as well.

On reflection and in discussion with the students families, I realise that we focus A LOT on reading (to try and catch them up to their peers) but I don't do much writing with them. Kian using voice typing to write which is fine, but Paul needs to work on his writing. 

Ryan - managing self

Ryan is still in a difficult time so I have not been pushing him a lot, but just loving him. That's all he needs right now. He has good and bad days, but has moments of clarity where he explicitly states what he is going to do (or not do..) in order to manage himself better. These are mostly social goals at the moment, but he is still trying his best.

He loves the inquiry topic we are doing this term and often sends me summaries about tornadoes and hurricanes, or draws pictures of them. This counts as learning for me because he is able to talk about what he has drawn or written in his own words.

Spiral of Inquiry (Term 1, Week 7)

Last week and this week our class has been looking at Statistics. 

Because of this, we can't use as much materials as we have when we were learning about place value and decimals. It's more practically inclined.

Last week as a break from their maths, I gave the students a basic facts test that is broken down by stages. I gave my lower students the stage 4 test (addition + subtraction to 10) and they all did great, so I gave them stage 5 (the national standard for year 5 students at the beginning of the year). Here they began to fall apart. 

I quickly realised that two of the boys didn't have the skill, knowledge and/or confidence to count backwards from a given number (up to 20), or subtract from 20. They were fine with 10, but 20 they couldn't do.

Today I pulled these two boys out for some materials maths. I got out the trusty popsicle sticks and we practised subtracting from 10. They understood this already and were confident in doing their takeaways, so I challenged them to not use their hands (i.e. imaging). I would ask them subtraction questions and they would answer without touching the popsicle sticks (I could see them counting in their heads though..). 

They quickly memorised their groupings to 10 (5+5, 3+7, 8+2, 1+9, 4+6 and vice versa) and were able to answer quickly. 

Next we moved onto doing the same thing, but up to 20. This was a bit harder for them and took a lot more practice before they felt confident. 

I asked them to lay their 20 popsicle sticks out in 2 rows of 10. This helped them to understand that 20-12 isn't so scary, you first -10 then -2, leaving you with 8. Both boys slowly caught onto this and were able to show how they were thinking using the popsicle sticks. Again we practised our groupings to 20 (12+8, 13+7, 15+5, etc). They struggled a little here so we got the sticks back out and practised a few more times. 

Here he is showing 20-6, by taking 6 sticks from one group of 10 and he is left with 4 ones in one row and 10 in the other row.

Here Lopi covers 3 sticks, showing 20-17. He got the point where he didn't need to physically take away the sticks, but could imagine them removed and give me the answer anyway.

As a cool down, I asked them 'what comes before' or 'what comes after' whatever number I thought of. They were amazing with numbers to 20, as it was fresh in their mind, and good until 100, then one boy fell apart and wouldn't answer anything above 100. This lack of confidence showed me he was quite insecure about his number knowledge in large numbers which is something I can address another time.

Then we practising skip counting, which is another thing I know they are not confident in doing. 

We used the popsicle sticks to count in groups of 2 and we also wrote it down.

They both left feeling good about themselves (important! maths self-efficacy is always so low..)  and knowing they COULD do it. I want to work them again so they don't forget the subtraction strategy they were practising today. They also need to practice skip counting, and improve their number knowledge of large numbers (100-1000).

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!

First week in my own class!

Today marks the finish of my first week in my own class!

And I tell you what, I am knackered. I have fallen asleep mid-afternoon every day this week (and for the previous two week as well lol).

Check out my lovelies!!

Also note that the link to our new class blog is here (and yes, it already has content!) and the class site I made here.

We have had such a great week together, done some learning and had lots of fun, and I love them a lot already. 

My class role is technically 23 (which is a small class by today's standards!), however I have only had 13-15 kids everyday, which is so weird! 

One person who has joined my class who was not originally on my roll is "Bob". 

(Referred to earlier in my blog here and here). Myself, Ottilie and our syndicate leader decided he would learn better in my class, as in the other class there were a few boys who would distract him VERY easily. I am stoked to have him back. I received a wonderful compliment from my mentor Archana, who told the the other year 5/6 teacher Ottilie that Bob would do great in my class again because 'I had the best relationship with him out of all the staff'. If you have read the previous posts on Bob, you will know I put a lot of effort and work into the relationship with this particular student and so I was delighted to have this effort acknowledged. Once he had moved into my class he settled in quickly and within the hour was part of the team. Having him in my class this year will present challenges as he is significantly lower than the bulk of my class academically, but we will make it work the best we can.

Another couple of things I have focused on doing in the first week of school is setting up my expectations for the kids, and their expectations of me. 

We have done a lot of activities where the kids had to work in various groupings which I purposely changed to force them to work with someone they don't know, getting them to share their ideas with a group, come up and write on the board, explain their mathematical thinking aloud to the class, speaking in front of the class while being videoed by me etc etc. These are all things I want them to get used to as these are things I expect the kids to do daily, so I wanted to include these expectations from day 1 so they are seen as normal and not scary. 

I wanted to be more transparent with my kids this year, not telling them absolutely everything of course, but just being more open with stuff they can know about and will  understand in terms of their learning. I have done this by explaining the term overview for our Inquiry units (what we will be doing week by week), my gaming unit (what we will be doing and why, and how this leads into coding next term). I have not seen teachers tell kids so far in advance what they will be doing and why. I'm not sure why we don't, it's not like its a secret, but in my experience it's not common practice. We seem to only tell them what they need to know for that particular day. I personally feel like if they knew where they were going, they would understand the importance of what they are doing now and be more motivated to do it well.

Another expectation I wanted the kids to have of me, is speaking Maori everyday. Yes, I am not fluent in Te Reo Maori nor do I profess to be confident in speaking the little that I know. However, it is something I didn't do at all last year and so I wanted to make sure I included Maori in some way, everyday, from day 1 of school. I start the day by greeting my kids 'ata pai toku aroha', which means good morning my loves, and farewelling them at the end of the day with 'ka kite ano apopo' which means see you again tomorrow. I have tried to include other words like korero (talk), but the kids didn't know what it meant so I just had to laugh.. 

Linked to my use of Maori, is my effort to try and call ALL my kids by names like my love, love, sweet, (etc) for example, 'love can you pass me the pencils?', 'thank you sweets'. I want my kids to feel like I instantly love them and feel like I do want them to be in my class, really building the whanau feeling. It hurts me to think that some of these kids come to school without being spoken to kindly by an adult all morning, or that there may be no adults in their life who tell them explicitly they are loved or wanted. It is part of my job as their teacher to be that person who tells them they are loved, wanted and supported. I think I have started this well.

It has been an exhausting week but a great one, and I am excited to get into some real learning next week now that I have gotten to know my new kids! 

Before school starts... (2017)

For the past week I have been setting up my very own class!

Yes, I am a second year teacher, but last year I was co-teaching with my mentor. At the beginning of last year, I was just fitting into her class. I didn't have any 'stuff' to bring with me and put into the class, nor did I have any preference for furniture arrangement, wall displays etc, I just turned up and everything was already there. So this year, I am setting up my own class on my own for the first time. It is vastly different than last year. Although I did make 'stuff' last year (e.g. wall displays), I left these behind in my old class and made my own newer versions. I wanted a fresh start. I have stuff (boxes, furniture, stuff to put on the walls, etc), I have some idea about where I want things (and why I want it like that) based on my experience from last year. 

The before photos...

The after photos...

I'm very proud of how my class has come together, and excited for what the term will bring. 

I have also already started working on some of my goals for this year, including being more assertive and doing things in the way I want to do them. Ottilie and I are going to be so great together and the kids are going to learn a lot, and have a lot of fun!

Watch me teach!

This morning I had my final observation from Paula Were (our literacy PD lady) on writing. To be honest, I was not feeling overly great about it - I was just feeling very tired, have pressure from uni assignments etc etc. Just not excited about it, ya know?

But I decided that whatever will be will be, and tried to just move on with my day.

I wanted to show Paula how I have been using videos in writing as I have found it so effective with our target students. Archana was with Paula (as she is the head of literacy) and the syndicate leader Aireen came to watch as well.

Here is my planning for this lesson.
My goals from previous lessons were 

Teacher goals:

• co-construct SC
• teacher model how to write
• scaffold through prompt
• take a video of lesson as evidence

Firstly, we talked about the WALT and co-constructed the SC. This included me giving them an example sentence 'the girl went down the stairs' and the students recorded their suggestions about how to add detail to make the sentence better to get their head around what 'detail' meant.

Next, I introduced our video prompt.
(0:00-0:20 only)



 I played it once through, and asked the students to record whatever thought they had about the clip.

We went through the clip again, and I paused at particular parts I wanted to emphasise. 

At these points I would scaffold the students to realise something the hadn't, use particular words (e.g. reflection), make them think deeper about a particular point (e.g the characters feelings).

After we had brainstormed lots of detail about the character, we then formed sentences which would make a paragraph. I wrote the first sentence for this to show students how we can combine ideas from different people and write it TOGETHER (i.e. teacher modelling).

Here is what we wrote together.

After this, I asked the students to go back to our WALT and SC and tick the things they thought we had done - they did this. One student pointed out that although we wrote we should include a simile, we didn't actually include one. I agreed, and said that can be our next steps for next time - making sure we do include one.

After this, the kids watched the rest of the clip (they were interested and hooked into this character and wanted to find out more..) and I went with Paula, Archana and Aireen. We interviewed a couple of the kids to check their understanding of the lesson (did they understand what the aim was? did they know how to achieve it? did they know who/what helped them?). 

After that, Paula, Archana, Aireen and I discussed my lesson and checked it off against a teacher criteria for effective writing practice (I will link this doc here once I receive it).

Things to celebrate about this lesson

• Using a resource that students all could connect and relate to 
• there was a lot of conversation about their own gaming consoles and the games they play
• the character was the same approximate age as the students so they could connect to his daily experiences
• Co-constructing the SC and ensuring students were able to refer back to it and check for themselves if they had achieved it
• Referring back to the WALT throughout the lesson and making sure we only focused on that one aim 
• the students made spelling/punctuation/etc mistakes, but I purposely ignored these as it was not the focus of the lesson
• one student also kept trying to jump ahead to the problem section of the narrative, but I kept him focused that we were only writing about the character
• Getting positive feedback from my peers (sometimes teachers don't celebrate each others success explicitly, which did happen today and was awesome to hear!)

Next Steps

• Have a specific vocabulary in mind that students will learn through the lesson - not just using words they already know
• Ensuring ALL the students are equally actively involved (in the lesson one student did say a lot less than others)

I would love to hear your feedback on this lesson! 

Digital Immersion (Term 4, Week 1)

Today, and lately, I have been thinking about how digital technology will affect and change teaching more and more. At Ulearn, I experienced two major breakouts in this field - the OMGTech session and the session where a teacher explains how she did game coding with her class. 

From someone somewhere, I was linked to this. This is an idea about what education in NZ will look like in 2025.. Have a read..

 Even now, we are starting to see this type of education already - kids using VR and augmented reality (I myself have done this with the Anatomy 4D app), teaching kids to code and programme, and preparing them for jobs that don't yet exist. 

Education has become an active social process, compared to the passive content-retention classrooms of the past. What will be the next big thing? How will this change the role and need for teachers?

On that note, today we did Hour of Code.
This is a digital coding programme is designed for children and adults alike, to slowly, step-by-step, introduce the key ideas behind game coding and get you doing each of these steps, before setting you off to make your own game/play around.
There are two main ways of coding..
Using blocks (i.e. like Scratch) and using Java script (i.e. like I did when I programmed the robot at Ulearn).

Here are two videos made up of screenshots, of me working through the two types of game formatting.

I found the Hour of Code really helpful and easy to use - it builds your skills one by one and exposes you to more complex ideas as you progress. This approach would be much better suited to kids, rather than jumping straight into using Scratch or Gamefroot with no preparation beforehand.

I think when I do coding with my kids (either end of this term, or next year..) I will follow this semi-structure.

1. Introduction to games (boardgames, knucklebones, card games etc) - aim: to build understanding of the purpose of games, the reason/need for instructions and get kids evaluating/reviewing games to see strengths and weaknesses.
2. Hour of code - aim: to build basic understanding of how game coding works
3. Use scratch to build onto basic game understandings - multiple characters, how to build in levels/points. Any game with no specified purpose - just practice!
4. Find a social problem in our community and design a game that will help/teach/inform about this social issue
5. Students form groups and design, then build, their own game using scratch.

I think I would also like to have a 'code club' as a lunchtime activity where students from any year level can come and code together to revise/build upon their skills.