DMIC PD 26/2/18

We had a PD session on DMIC in our staff meeting on Monday where we practised working on a maths problem collaboratively at different levels.

Key messages from the session were:
- The maths problem needs to be challenging enough that no one child can solve it on their own - they need to work collaboratively.

- The teacher needs to have high expectations of all students.  These can be used to motivate - e.g. 'I'm going to give you a really tricky problem because I know you are capable.' This can empower children.

- The problems need to be engaging.  For example use a cultural context or something that the children are into.

I found it useful to have the facilitator clarify some points about how the maths lesson should be set up and structured.

- The groups should be pre-organised and written into the modelling books.  Year 0-2 children should be in pairs, or if a child is a non-counter, buddied up with two counters.

- The half of the class that is not working with the teacher should be engaged in quiet, meaningful work, but DMIC does not specify exactly what this is.  It could be a problem they have worked on with the teacher the previous day but with the numbers changed.

- The warmup is not a chance to teach the strategy that will be used in the problem but a chance to work on number knowledge etc.  It can be something unrelated to the problem, for example choral counting.

- The teacher should keep a journal with anecdotal notes about how the children approach the problems.  This 'professional noticing' helps teachers to understand where children are at.

- Maths planning should be shared in team meetings.

- Role playing can be used to set up the routine parts of the sessions - for example children can role play speaking in a clear voice to the class (and what happens if they mumble when presenting).

- For juniors, when a group is presenting, the teacher draws what they are saying.

- Connect back to the big idea at the end.

- Connect to the context - if the answer is '435' - '435 what?'

Kohia PCT course 14/2/18

Today I attended the first session for the PCT course for 2nd year teachers at Kohia Education Centre. I did not attend the first year part of this course so it was interesting to see what was covered and I can see it will be valuable to connect with other teachers at a similar stage in their teaching journey. Below are my notes from the session:

Choose a picture and introduce another person not yourself - less social risk.

Teacher sharing little stories from morning tea - introduce new vocab - e.g. eating
lamingtons at morning tea…

Making parents feel welcome - share culture, what their child is good at, taking
away parents’ fear of school.  

Make sure evidence in portfolio links to PTC.  

Make sure reflections are targeted and critical - have a “so what.”

Can follow this structure: Description/Interpretation/Outcome

Make sure there is a narrative to follow.  

Deliberate Acts of Teaching

Questioning ‘“I wonder…”

Feedback - specific!

Record yourself….see how much you are questioning.  Effective questioning?

How much are you using the deliberate acts of teaching?

Can reflect on this.  

“I wonder why…” gives the impression that there’s not a right or wrong answer.

Importance of wait time/thinking time.

Can talk the night before about what children could write about the next day.  

Push number knowledge.

Setting up for success

“It’s your lucky day” - system for monitors - lucky day person gets to tidy library corner,
do lunches etc.  
Have alliterative name.

Set up better system for early finishers.

Morning routine photographed and put in steps.  Can send home to parents.  

Establish one out of reading, writing and maths first, then bring others in.  

Literate environment

Oral language is a prerequisite for writing.  

Rich oral language

Classroom filled with texts

Motivating area to inspire writing - eg. area that

Kids need to see good models of handwriting as well as typed words!
 Handwritten poems, for example.

Writing lessons should be about writing skills not content knowledge.

Writing topics need to be open enough for all children to access.  

Approaches to reading:

Reading to

Shared reading - modelling decoding, making meaning, thinking critically.

1st reading predicting, links to prior knowledge, reading for enjoyment.

Follow up could be dramatising the text!

Visual language - follow up

Innovating text - writing sentences based on the sentence structure in the book-

Eg. Brown Bear, brown bear what do you hear?  Honour, Honour, what do you hear?”

Shared reading book - sample weekly plan for Grandpa, Grandpa

M - WALT use our prior knowledge/make connections

Focus: what do you like doing with your grandpa? What makes grandparents special?

T - WALT understand punctuation

Focus: Full stop, question mark

W - make word families

Focus: -et word family

Th - WALT read fluently/think critically

Focus: What did the author have to know about fishing to write the story?

F - WALT be creative

Focus: Make a collage about your grandpa

What Does the Tide Bring In?

Where did your feet take you in the holidays?

Portraits?

Sand names?

Monkey’s Shoes

M - would a monkey really wear shoes?

Vocab around shoes

T - Introduce word ‘pair’ What else comes in pairs? Solve maths problem about pairs of shoes

W - Punctuation

• Bring in a whole lot of shoes - classify the shoes.
  
  

Th - Make a list of ‘sh’ words

F - Design and make your own shoes - make an advertisement for your shoes. Identify positive

features of shoes - oral language - “These shoes are flexible and will make you run fast.”  

Guided reading

Tumble - a couple of activity they have to do: Browsing box, poetry book

Then...as long as you’ve done good reading to, shared reading, guided reading...they can choose

puzzles etc. Put say five things on the board. Playdough, cutting, construction, writing table

(make little books).  Blocks etc (learning to share).  

Lego - challenge to make things from the big book.  

Consequences for noise etc - “Pack up that activity and go to the library corner.”

Independent reading

Poems/songs

Another way to get children’s eyes across print!

Use nursery rhymes

Skills flow - match sentences with a picture.  

Kids listen to sentence, repeat sentence, match it with a picture.

Then describe pictures in writing.  

Eg. Before school I put up my star name.

After lunch I read quietly from my book box.  

4-6 pictures.

Book recommendations:

The Time it took Tom - good maths picture book

Row, Row, Row your waka

Discovery Time: Learning Through the Key Competencies

The Essential Oral Language Toolkit

Takeaway:

The main messages I got from today's session is the importance of reading to children (something I do a lot in my classroom), the importance of sharing stories about ourselves with the children (something I need to do more) and how to structure a week's worth of shared reading sessions around a big book.

I will try following Andy's structure for planning activities around the big book next week and see how these activities help the children engage with the text.

Another message I got from today was that it is important that children see good models of handwritten text in the classroom. I often spend time typing and printing things to feel like they look 'professional' and this was a good revelation for me!

Yolanda Soryl Early Words course

I went on Yolanda Soryl's Early Words course in the holidays and her approach is something I'd like to implement in the classroom. 

She talked about the importance of teaching visual discrimination skills, starting with name recognition.  A way to do this with New Entrants is to put names on children's coat hooks with velcro and jumble them up each day.  Another is to use a smart tray for matching images.

Yolanda talked about the most important words to start with - the ones she starts with are: the, is, my, go, I, to, like, mum and dad.

She says that when she introduces a new word she puts it on a card and moves the card around to make sure that the child's eyes are tracking.
She says 'touch it/see it/say it.'

She showed a word ladder that she uses to introduce new words every day before her big book. This has a couple of words on it (not alternating) and the children read the words as they go up and down the ladder. 

Yolanda then went through the approach she uses in her programme, showing example lessons on Youtube.  I have bought the book so will make up a kit and try the programme out. 

A big emphasis of this course was on praise.  Yolanda got us to watch some of her sample lessons and count the number of times she gave out specific praise.  She gave out praise even for sitting carefully on the chair.  This obviously helped to create a positive environment for learning the words. 

Takeaway: I will pay attention to the frequency and specific nature of the praise that I give out at reading time.  In the next holidays I will make up an Early Words kit and test out the programme.  For children that are really struggling to learn the high-frequency words, this approach that introduces them gradually sounds like a good idea.  

New ideas for 2018

I am moving to May Road School in 2018 and will be teaching a Year 1 and 2 class.  Here are some things I would like to change for 2018:

Have a pocket for each child for writing samples like Siale does - update throughout the year for easy access to writing samples - no need to photocopy books.  

Have monitors from start of year - with job descriptions.  

Music for transitions and tidy up.

Plan into modelling books more for reading.  Could put all week’s plans into modelling books as I write my

Better routine for sharpening pencils - one container of sharp ones, one of blunt and a pencil monitor to sharpen them.

Better routine for book bags and getting packed up at end of day.

Probably don’t need sticky calendar - if I do use it again have a calendar monitor.  

Establish noise meter at start of year.  

Star of the day.

More rewards (privileges and games rather than material things).  

Maybe change reading taskboard.

‘Rainy Day’ suitcase of activities.

Box of wet day sheets

Better system for keeping track of unfinished worksheets etc - model with kids at start of year.  

Enforce expectations at start of year for:

Sitting on the mat

Lining up after morning tea/lunch

What to do before school and what time it’s ok to come into the classroom

What to do when another adult comes into the classroom

Kind words

Where to put finished and unfinished work

Better finishing system for fast writers.

One day a week for picture book activities.

Could have big pictures of Julia Donaldson characters and “Write 10 sentences to describe” for each character.  

Make an alphabet book with pictures that start with each letter.  

Weeding the garden

Weeding the school garden and planting seed potatoes is an activity I have been using as a language experience.  It has been good for reinforcing new vocabulary and I have seen some new words such as "trowel" popping up in stories.  I enjoyed David's description: "The potatoes looked like they had crab legs" describing the buds on the potatoes.

Spelling lesson observation

I watched Shabnam teaching spelling with Leytia.

She was revising consonant blends and had written them on a chart like they were equations.

b+l=bl

c+l=cl

d+r=dr

s+t+r=str

s+c+r=scr

She defined blends as "2 or more consonants put together to make a new sound."

Shabnam then wrote up some letter combinations and asked the children "Is that a blend or not?"

The first one she put up was 'st.'
One child said it was and Shabnam restated "So you can hear the sound of the s and the sound of the t...is that what you're saying?"

She then put up "ch."  "Is that a blend?" she asked.  "Why or why not?"

Monisha said "You can't hear the c and the h."

She then put up "sh."  She got them to imagine putting the letters together.

She gave them "wh" and asked if the letters could be separated.  She gave Irma the word "whale" and asked if the w and the h could be separated in that word.  She then introduced the idea of digraphs.  "So if it's not a blend it's a digraph."
She shared the purpose of this new learning: "We are learning this so you'll be  able to use them in your writing.  Sometimes we have to sound things out but we can't.  So we just have to know them."

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.

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.  

Writing PD with Leytia

This term we have been having writing PD with Leytia Leota-Preston.  I observed two writing lessons with her (in Shabnam and Sandhya's classes) and she observed one of my lessons.  One of Leytia's key messages has been that language experiences are valuable for engaging writers (especially boys).  One of the language experiences she talked about at our PD session in the holidays was dissecting a hammerhead shark.  When I watched Shabnam's lesson on adding adjectives, I got the idea of using post it notes to collect student voice.
When Leytia came to watch my writing lesson I got the children to taste a small piece of mango.  I got them to go around in a circle and describe the mango.  I then got them to write their description on a post it note and identify which of the senses it belonged to. I added the post it note to a a chart organised into the different senses.

The resulting writing had some great descriptions using a range of adjectives.