As always, another session with lots to think about!
One thing I really took out of the day was the concept of Read like writers and Write like Readers. This is where we get our students to imitate the writing style of an author they have read. I'm interested to see how my students will go with this.
One thing that Kiri raised to us was about what are our children doing when they aren't with us. This made me think long and hard if all my activities that I have for my learners are worth while. She spoke about having a 50/50 split responsibility being put on my learners and myself as a teacher, I thought this was a great idea and I will re-incorporate the 'Mahi Tracker' with my children as of next week.
One thing that was interesting is planning for 1 on 1 conferencing, I often find that I just think this will happen and it often gets forgotten about, however, if I plan for this explicitly I know it will happen. The thing I will struggle with is where does that time come from?
This image is great, goes to show exactly what learning is and how it should be done. I'm looking forward to showing my learners this, so they know they need to be in the Pit for them to learn. It's okay not to know things.
What opportunities am I giving my learners to have ownership over their learning?
I like the thought of Mixed Ability grouping, I have been doing this for Poetry, teaching this whole class then choosing mixed ability groups to work with, this has been great so far as we are all learning about language features as their is very little prior knowledge in our classroom.
Goals moving forward: Have my mahi tracker working, focus on beginnings of stories, continue my poetry, do my podcast rotations with my reading groups.
What are people's thoughts on doing a novel study with the whole class? (Reading ages 9-12.5) Mixed ability grouping??
Hi Zac, I also liked the way we can link our reading and writing through 'mentor texts' I used this successfully in poetry too getting the students to write their own versions of poems we had read. I'll be interested to see which Mahi tracker you think is going to work best for you, this is a graet way to get the students to take ownership of their learning and to monitor their own completion of tasks, especially if they are doing must do's and can do's. Planning for conferencing can be overlooked in our crowded day but as you say if we value these conversations with our students we need to make sure they take place. As to the Novel Study we must remember to ask the others. I know I have done film study very successfully with mixed ability groups, I don't know that I have been as successful with a novel study unless it was a shared book. Keep up the awesome effort you are putting into your programme! Kiri
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