Zentangle

For the last few weeks we have been doing a class swap once a week to get the children familiar with their classes for next year.  I have had a group of Year 3 children who are going on to the senior school this year.  They have had 3 1/2 hour sessions so I decided to get them to make some zentangle bugs.  This was the one I made as a model to demonstrate the technique and different kinds of patterns to use:

I was so impressed with the artwork they created in this short time:

I showed the early finishers a zentangle hand I had made to put in my relieving go-bag and they created their own, tracing around their hands:

A fun and effective way to explore patterning!

Cress heads

 In Science we have been learning about what plants need to grow and survive.  To provide different contexts to learn this information I provided a range of different plant activities.  We grew cress and wheatgrass from seed in these cress head containers and in a 'cress diary' recorded the plants' progress.  We experimented with growing bean seeds in different conditions after making predictions about the conditions that would be best for germinating the seeds.
We cut out images of things that would help the seeds to germinate and placed these on plant diagrams.

And when the 'cress heads' had grown nice and long we gave them a haircut and sampled them in a sandwich.
PTC 8  Demonstrate in practice their knowledge and understanding of how ākonga learn
ii  Provide opportunities and support for ākonga to engage with, practise and apply new learning to different contexts.

Skittles and fruit loops

We did algebra for our strand maths last week and to make our patterning a bit more hands-on I brought in some skittles and fruit loops.  We practised continuing patterns on pattern cards and making up and recording our own patterns.  

 The student engagement in this activity reminded me of the importance of making lessons hands-on and using different materials to demonstrate ideas.  Having encountered the materials in everyday life made connections between prior experiences.

PTC 8. Demonstrate in practice their knowledge and understanding of how ākonga learn
i. enable ākonga to make connections between their prior experiences and learning and their current learning activities

The RTLB I have been working with recommended that I read a chapter from this book to support strategies that we have been using with a child who shows defiant behaviour.  The chapter was on positive praise, and talked about how important positive praise was to children who have trouble regulating their emotions.  It pointed out that with these children it can be very difficult to find positive behaviours to praise so teachers need to train themselves to notice them.  Webster-Stratton talks about one teacher keeping stones in her pocket and moving a stone from one pocket to another each time she praised the target child.  I have read a lot about practising gratitude being a way to train the brain to notice positive things, I guess this works on a similar principle.  In the chapter Webster-Stratton talked about the importance of even praising steps towards the desired behaviour.  I would like to read the whole book when I have time and will definitely put effort into noticing praiseworthy behaviour - important for all children not just those behaving defiantly.  

7. promote a collaborative, inclusive and supportive learning environment

i. demonstrate effective management of the learning setting which incorporates successful strategies to engage and motivate ākonga ii. foster trust, respect and cooperation with and among ākonga

Ready to go with Ready to Read

In November I attended a workshop run by Team Solutions that was about the new titles in the Ready to Read series.  There has been a review of this series and there are new ideas about its texts.  Previously the big books used for shared reading were enlarged versions of the books used for guided reading, with the idea that children could be introduced to the books in shared reading, and that this would make it easier to read them in guided reading sessions.  The thinking now about this is that being introduced to the texts first in shared reading reduces opportunities for building a reading practice.  This is because children can come to rely on memory, rather than using strategies to decode the texts they read.
The colour wheel has been removed from the shared books in response to this.

Also linked to memorising texts - the new Ready to Read guided texts are less repetitive in structure than previous texts, giving children more of an opportunity to use decoding strategies in guided reading.  I thought this was a positive step, as I have observed some of my new entrants learning the sentence structure in guided reading books then not really attending to the text as they read, just plugging in the change they can see in the picture.  I have a girl in my class who can still 'rattle off' the content of books she read in her previous class almost without looking at the words, which is an impressive skill in itself but not the intention in guided reading lessons.  One of my colleagues disagreed that the repetitive structure was a problem, saying that it helped to provide practice in correctly structuring a sentence, particularly for those with low oral language skills.  We have been learning in our other literacy PD that it is important for children with low oral language skills to be provided with models of correctly-structured sentences.  This led to a discussion of 'round robin' reading which the facilitator saw as an ineffective strategy.  Some saw it as a way to make sure children were supported with correct sentence structures.  I have done some round robin reading with my reading groups but have noticed that children 'tune out' when it is not their turn.  I have started instead to get them to read 'quietly in your mind' and asking questions to check comprehension.
This is my response to the article we read as part of this PD, "Ready to go with Ready to Read" by Kay Hancock:

PTC 4:

4. demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of personal professional practice

i. identify professional learning goals in consultation with colleagues ii. participate responsively in professional learning opportunities within the learning community iii. initiate learning opportunities to advance personal professional knowledge and skills