Day 9 - Sharing Reading

 Wow, today was our last day together on RPI, we finished with a bang!

What an amazing day of learning. 

We started with hearing that Share aspect of our pedagogy is just as important as learn and create. As you see below, the 3 parts are just as important to one another. Our learners having an authentic audiecnce gives them more drive to complete their tasks to a high standard and post it on their blogs.

As you can see below, we had 342,376 blog posts from our learners this year in the Manaiakalani, the even more impressive part of this is that there us 125,397 comments, which shows that our learners are getting an authentic audience, our learners blog posts are being seen and commented on. This gives them more drive to make their work even better!

Another thing we heard today was about using our learners blogs as a source of formal assessment. All of us teachers right now around Aotearoa are in the same boat when it comes to writing reports, what better resource do we have to make OTJ's than our learners blogs! Use them!

This image below is a massive problem teachers all around the world have.  It can be so difficult getting our children to complete their work and then posting it on their blog. In our team at school we have 'FIOP' (Finish It Off Properly) time, where our students get some quiet time in the classroom to complete their learning tasks from the week and then post them on their blog. I normally cast my 'Turn it in' page on the TV so students can see what they need to complete.

Today we learned about another pillar; Sharing. As you can see, sharing is such an important aspect of our learners journey through education, if there isn't an authentic audience for our children, they might have no drive to complete their work.

We then learned about feedback. The 3 different types of feedback can be broken up into:

- Reminder

- Scaffold

- Example

When giving feedback you should base it on one of these prompts depending on the needs of your learner.

Here I have done an example of Reminder Descriptive Feedback.

Here I have done an example of Scaffolding Descriptive Feedback. 

We then talked about how we can share with our whanau. We were put into groups, I worked with Hinemoana and we thought to do something about the Hikoi that's happening at the moment, to do some learning about it in the classroom, write a script with some questions on it and go home and ask your whanau questions and if they are unsure of answers, our learners would be able to teach them.

Massive thank you to Pt England School for giving me the opportunity to be a part of the RPI group this year. I have learned so much and gained so much confidence in my reading teaching. I'm already excited for next year and getting my reading programme up and running again! Thank you so much to the Manaiakalani team for always being so positive and uplifting and giving us so many different ideas throughout this program.

Keep watching this space

RPI, we out, for now!

Day 8: Homework

 It's been a while since I posted! 

I have my final RPI session in a few days, which i'm excited about.  During my groups final session I was catching some sun in the islands of Croatia. I'm back now, and ready to get stuck back in.

First thing, I have been doing podcasting all year, I decided to do a podcast as my create task. My top reading group 12-14 readers are reading the novel, Wonder. We did an update on the book in our podcasting. Check it out here!

I completed the readers profile survey with my learners again and was quite suprised with the results!

A lot of my learners started the year not being very confident in their own reading ability, if you look below this has rapidly changed!

This is another graph showing that my learners are enjoying reading more at school.

Thanks for reading, please leave me a comment! Will be back with Day 9 of my RPI soon!

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.  

RPI Day 2 - Know your learners as readers

 Day 2!

What an awesome start to day 2, Dorothy came on to our chat and really inspired me to get KPE (Korero Pt England) running at our school again!  I love letting my learners be creative with the follow up activity they get to do with their text set each week and what better way to do it than this! Watch this space...

This is the common literacy practice model that helped mould Learn, Create, Share with adding digital technologies this not only engages students but gives us access to the biggest resource in the world, Google.  

Collecting Assessment Data 

It's so important to use a mixture of both Formative and Summative Assessments to evaluate our learners.

Teacher Workbook

The next thing that we looked at was the Teacher Workbook, this was great to hear Naomi and Kiri talk about and elaborate the 'why' that we use this.  I've been using this since the start of the year and I love it! I love that everything is all in one Google Sheet.  You have all your data collated together and can continually check the progress your learners are making.  I'm going to be using the text coverage aspect of the Teacher Workbook so I know that my learners will be reading a range of genres.

Task Boards

I was lucky enough that my team leader (Rob Wiseman) has got our team of teachers using these for all core subject areas.  I like the idea of adding small tasks as well as the main tasks that you have for your learners during the week.

Next steps for me - Get in touch with Dorothy and find out more about Korero Pt England and see how I can use this in my classroom with my learners, this will relate back to the MIT Inquiry I did in 2018 where I made this resource.

RPI - Knowing your learners survey.

This year I will be inquiring into my reading practise as I participate in the RPI (Reading practise intensive). 

My wondering is: How do I develop my learner's ability to participate and engage in extended discussion about a text and how is this going to improve their vocabulary and reading comprehension?

Inquiry/RPI Update:

This week we have started doing Robyn Anderson's Reading challenge, I have changed her Reading challenge and adapted it to Epic (online book library), this is one of the rotations that I have in my Reading lessons.  By doing this I will get my learners reading a range of different genres.  After learners have read a text from Epic they screenshot the image and put it on the bingo board! When learners complete the board they receive a prize.

After doing the Reading survey with my learners, 2 major answers really stood out to me.  The first being that 25 learners in my class don't enjoy reading in their own time.  We've had big discussions in our class about what texts you can be reading in our own time, whether it be sports reports, animal facts, comic strips or a crime documentary.  We have started doing 2 x 20 minute blocks a week that we call reading for enjoyment where our learners are allowed to choose any text or online article that choose to read and this is silent reading time, although this has only been going for 3 weeks, it has been great to see our learners engage in 'reading for enjoyment' time.

The next data that really suprised me was that 9 students in my class said they don't think that I think they're good readers.  This comes down to how they view what reading group they're in and how they aren't confident readers.  I need to make sure that I continually praise my learners for the little achievements they make in reading.  I also need to celebrate progress that learners make in our class and let them know what reading age they achieve after they have done their testing,

RPI - Session 1 - Reading is core.

Wow what an amazing first day of learning.  Firstly want to say just how grateful I am to be a part of this programme.

What makes a good reader?

This was the first question given to us, I had written down; asking questions, critical thinking, comprehending a text, making predictions and having fluency whilst reading.  The image below is what we were shown after we had noted down the ideas we had.

This was really interesting and we were able to go into our smaller breakout groups and discuss these in further detail.  I'm finding that my learners aren't enjoying reading as much as they could be.  After reading about Robyn Andersen's inquiry about getting her learners to enjoy reading it has motivated me to try some of the outcomes she has had.  I have an intermediate class and think it would be a fantastic opportunity to buddy up with a junior class and go with them to the library so we can read them books about a range of genre and/or get the juniors to choose the books that will engage them.

Reading Across the Curriculum

This is a very important aspect that we were learning about today.  Richard Johnston (Panmure Bridge Principal) spoke in great detail about how reading is never going to be just in a 40 minute block eachday.  It's the core of everything.  It is used in every subject area and allows you to experience a wide range of genre.  Robert Wiseman (Team Leader) has implemented the Task Boards into our Reading, Writing and Maths programme which has really helped me with planning a range of genre each week and reading across the curriculum.

Pillars of Practise

I really enjoyed spending time discussing this aspect of Reading, I loved the idea of learning with the end in mind, it got me reflecting on my own progress and thinking about what I want my learners to know after each week, and be explicit with my learners about these WALTs and Success Criteria.  At the start of the year I did the 'Reader profile survey' with my learners and was really interested at the outcomes, these results will be shared in the above blog post.  Doing this survey really gave me a head start on knowing my learners.

Reflection

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

One thing that I was shown today, this another one of Robyn's gems, was the Reading Challenge's she does with her kids, these are simple to complete, and there is competition to go along with it.  I'm sure this will be a hit with my boys that can struggle in engaging in follow up tasks from time to time.  We want our learners to be confident in their ability to read.  When thinking back to task boards and engagement, I need to be choosing themes and texts that are going to engage my learners, making sure they are reading a range of genres each week. 

In my class I currently have 'Epic'(Online Book Library) as a reading rotation, my learners love this, however, this is something that I'm not tracking.  I think Robyn's book bingo will be great for my learners as they navigate through the different genres of texts.

Day 1 was incredible, the slide/image below sums up my journey so far.  Teaching reading really is like rocket science, it's such a hard thing to do, however, i'm sure after i've finished this course I will have a greater understanding about incorporating this into my teaching to give my students the accelerated progress they are capable of.