RPI Day 8 - Create in Reading!

Ever since I started at Pt England school I have been challenged by Dorothy Burt to be creative and get our learners creating. This is something I have enjoyed doing since I started my teaching career, and I enjoy learning about new ways we can get our learners creating!

One thing that was really interesting to hear about was the create task can be before, during or after reading. I normally will get my learners doing their create task after reading with their follow up task. I could be doing create tasks when we discuss the predictions we have of the text.  If the story is about something you are able to do outside of your classroom you could stop and do it during the reading lesson.

Naomi and Kiri gave us a poem and asked us to pick a verse and to find an image to describe it in Google Draw or using AI. I decided to use craiyon.com.  I found this site really helpful, if you use specific vocabulary in your description the ai generator gives you a great image of what you're asking for. This is a great activity to do with your learners as they need to make sure they have specific vocabulary or the image won't come out as they want it.

We have to always remember that our learners have so much creativity flowing through them at all times.  This was a great article showing that we need to keep giving our learners creative opportunities to shine.  This session was really inspiring for me as I feel like I give my learners opportunities to create, however, it's about thinking outside the box and throughout the lesson of all the different opportunities and the range of create activities we can use. 

Below is a create task we were asked to complete to create a book trailer of a book of our choice, hope you enjoy and what to read the book!

RPI Day 7 - Critical Thinking

Today I was lucky enough to have a 1 on 1 session with Naomi as I've just finished my 5 week travels across Europe!

 

I found this day really interesting as Critical Thinking is one of the most important aspects for kids to comprehend and analyse a text and make their own opinions based of what they're reading.  

Naomi spoke in depth about making sure we think more deeply about the text.  For this to happen, we as teachers need to plan and think about ways that are going to get our learners thinking deeper about the text. When we spoke about this, one thing I thought about a lot was creating my provocations for our extended discussions, making sure that my learners could have deep conversations about the theme/idea from the text.

This is an example of how we can get our children thinking critically when doing their follow up activities. This was an activity that Naomi asked us to create for our learners to use in their follow up which will get our learners thinking more critically about the text.

I really enjoyed this session, we were able to have really good discussion about how to get our learners critically thinking with the teacher and during their follow up, I was so grateful that we were given a huge resource to help us make this happen!

Thanks heaps for today Naomi!

Update on our Extended Discussion - Our extended discussion in our classroom is happening and going well.  After multiple talks with my team leader (Rob Wiseman) I noticed that I wasn't being explicit enough with the expectations before our discussions.  I'm making sure before every lesson we go back to the ground rules for talk and make sure that I'm always referring back to these, I also talk about what our goal was that we had for this lesson, based around the ground rules for talk, this has been great as it reminds our children to focus on a certain aspect in the discussion.