Writing observation in J8

I observed writing in J8 - they were working on using commas correctly.  

Sandhya started by talking about punctuation - she gave the example of  a full stop being a kind of punctuation.  The children clapped their hands with a fist to demonstrate a full stop.  

Then Sandhya modelled a sentence with commas.  She said "I like apples, bananas and pears."  She got the children to repeat it after her, to hear how the comma would make you say the words.

She then role played a sentence with commas by getting some children to stand up.  She said "I like Esita, Jacob and Hamid."  pointing to each child as she said their name. 

She then wrote the sentence on the board without the commas and chose children to write the commas in a different colour.  

The children's writing task was to choose three to five words from their red dictionary and to use them in a sentence.  They then had a follow-up worksheet.

Takeaway:  I liked the way Sandyha used role playing to visually represent the sentence - it made it come alive for the children.  Another good tip I picked up while observing was that if Sandhya wanted a child to come back later she would wave her hand around her face like the hands of a clock.  This was a great non-verbal signal to come back later.  

PTC 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

Student voice

As well as in writing, I have found post-it notes to be a good way to collect student voice for PE reflections.  We have been reflecting on PE after each lesson and it has been really interesting to see the students' responses, they are often very honest.  

A next step would be to get the students to explain and justify their answers further.

Paua drawings

 I was very proud of these paua drawings my class have been working on - I passed around a polished paua shell and got the class to notice things about the shell - the colours and patterns they could see, the texture and shape of the shell.  I then got them to draw the shell with pastel and outline details with black vivid.

They wrote a description of the paua shell and I got some of them to read their stories at our assembly.
I think the observational drawing we have been doing has been great for noticing objects carefully and has helped with thinking of adjectives in writing.  The paua inspired these pieces of writing:

Reflection on Term 2

Reflection on Term 2

The class has been more settled in Term 2.  I think this is because I have been following behaviour management plan carefully and identified routines that needed to be clarified.  I still need to do further work on getting the children to use voices of an appropriate volume, and looking after property. I am going to work with the RTLB in term 3 on this.  

Using language experiences has continued to be useful for engaging students in writing.  We have done lots of food-based language experiences like eating mango, telling the difference between sugar and salt, icing gingerbread cookies and eating sour lemon.  

In maths, I have some students who have been struggling with simple addition - I have been giving them lots of practice with picture cards with dominoes on to reinforce this.  I have noticed that having the visual representation of the numbers really helps and most of these struggling children are now able to write a simple addition equation correctly.  

In reading, I have been looking for an alternative to the taskboard.  I would like to have more of a Daily 5 kind of system, where children have a choice in the order they complete activities, as long as they complete them in the given time.  I have been reading about how to introduce parts of the Daily 5 such as building reading stamina, so may introduce this in Term 3.  Other ideas are a must do/may do system or a change to the way the taskboard is organised.  

I am thinking about starting a new reading group for my very low readers just focused on sight words and alphabet - having had a new girl start who is very low in reading and writing is making me think I need this.  

This is the list I made of things to change for Term 3:

Must do/may do system for reading instead of taskboard? Or Daily 5?

New songs

Display maths resources better - small labelled boxes on top of trolley.  

Make box of activities for lowest writing box to do independently.

More number recognition/ordering activities for lower maths children.  

Add velcro to the Colourful Semantics sentence cards so they’re easier to use.  

Group norms for maths clearly displayed to remind me and the children of these norms.