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.

RPI Day Six - Vocabulary

This was my favourite day so far. (Don't know if I'm allowed to say this lol).

The foundation of reading starts with having a rich vocabulary.

Firstly, we were given a maintenance check to see when/how we are teaching vocabulary in our classrooms, I only was able to say I did 2/5 of these vocabulary routines in my classroom. We spoke about getting our learners reading for enjoyment, this is something I have implemented in my classroom, giving students a certain time of the week where they're able to read a text of their choice.

'Vocabulary knowledge accounts for 80% of the variance in reading comprehension, and is the strongest predictor of reading comprehension.'

Teachers all around the world teach vocabulary by getting students to look up the definition and write it down, how can we be more creative and get our learners more engaged in learning new words?

I enjoyed learning about the different Tiers of words. Tier 1 being high frequency words, tier 2 being more difficult words that learners will need to unpack throughout the text and tier 3 being specific topic focussed vocabulary that you wouldn't be able to use outside of this topic.  When planning for reading, we need to find Tier 2 words that our learners are going to be able use in their every day lives.

We were given exemplars of vocabulary tasks that we can use in our classroom.  After having a go at doing these, we then made our own activities.  This was a rich task and gave me a really good idea of how I wanted to go about doing follow up tasks rich of vocabulary. By doing this learners are able to continue learning the vocabulary we were doing during our guided reading lessons.

I look forward to using this in my reading programme! Another awesome day!

RPI Day 5 - Planning a Reading Programme

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??

RPI Day 4 - Guided Reading

Just before my weekly blog post I'd like to let everyone know that we had a Kahoot to see who was paying attention the best during the day out of about 20 of us and I won, yes, Zac Moran won! Hahah

Day 4! 

I always love starting the day with how my small breakout team has been going and how my homework went.  It's a great start to the day and we are able to catch up with everyone and see how everyone has been going implementing RPI into their Reading programme. 

Just to let my readers know, I have taken a lot of screenshots this week, there were so many good slides and different things that I wanted to share with you all!

One of the first things that were talked about was the importance of having a word wall in your classroom.  I'm going to make one of these for my classroom wall and make sure that we update it weekly.

There are so many different aspects to a reading programme in a classroom, the timetable below is a great plan showing you how you can incorporate everything!  These 6 bullet points are all really important for our learners to be good readers. This leads into my next goal that I have come up with that my mentor and I discussed.  Friday is going to be whole class Poetry day and I'm going to try doing Kiri's 'Chunky Challenge' vocab game.  I'll let you all know how it goes in my next post.

One of our homework tasks was to get 2 videos of our learners and we marked how they went with their 'reading fluency' against the fluency rubric below.  I'm going to make this one of the tasks my learners will do in our response to text as a create activity.  I think it will be a good chance for my learners to listen to themselves. I can also use this rubric to mark my learners against how they did in their podcasting.

What an incredible session, I'm pretty inspired to go and teach reading tomorrow! Buuuuuut, we have camp!  We are going to start Week 2 with a bang for our Reading programme.  My new things that I'm implementing are my Poetry and Vocab Fridays. I'm also only going to be doing a 2 week rotation with my groups between podcasting and my normal reading programme with text sets and response to text activities.  Stay tuned for my next post!

Christchuch MIT Presentation

RPI Day 3 - Text Selection

 Day 3 RPI - Text Selection

Over the last few weeks I have been continuing scaffolding the ground rules with my learners in my classroom.  I sat down with my mentor (Toni Nua) and she took me back to the data to see what my learners needed.  We looked back at our PAT Reading Comprehension results and realised that my target group had struggled with reading and understanding Poetry.  This goes to show I need to be doing more poetry with my learners on a regular basis rather than this being a one off in my class room (face palm).

We firstly went into our break out groups where Kiri explained to me how she did a poem every week with her kids a few years back.  I think this is a fantastic idea and am going to start trying to do a different poem every Friday.  I'll try to make a fun engaging create activity to go with it.

When looking at text selection with our students, we need to make sure as teachers we're having half of the texts as books in front of our learners and the other half being online texts/videos.  One thing I loved that Dorothy mentioned this morning was no matter how great online apps are, they’ll never do the job as a teacher, these apps should never be what your planning/learning is based around.

Pillars of Practise

Today we are looking at the pillar of 'Inside the Classroom'

Text Sets

This is the best part of learning, having different text sets about different ideas/themes/people/places opens you up to a world of learning/knowledge.

When looking at the image below, this is the best way of creating a text set.  It is important to pick a text you know that your learners will engage with.  Once you have chosen your instructional text, you need to choose a complementary text that will offer your learners more information about your theme. Next, you need to select a tension/challenge text, this is always the best for starting discussions, this makes learners look at the other side of the story/argument, learners have to use information that they have learned to support their ideas.  Lastly, the student selected text, I usually use an epic article, or a YouTube video, this is always engaging.

Today we worked on making a text selection, I did mine on a theme of the 'History of Kilikiti'. Students have the 3 texts to read and 2 YouTube videos to watch.  Click here for a link to the slides.

The one thing I would share with my syndicate from today would be what I learned from the text sets, but mainly how to use Journal Surf and the filters from the advanced search that you can use, I foound these great!

This was another amazing session, thanks heaps to Naomi, Kiri, Sharon and Dorothy for giving us this opportunity to better our teaching.