Observational drawing

My colleague who is doing her TESOL diploma has been using observational drawing to support her literacy programme.  After talking to her about how good it was for getting children to notice details, a very useful skill for reading, I tried some with my class.  I collected some plastic toys and interesting objects and modelled noticing the details in an object by pointing out the feathers on this penguin and the lines on its feet and beak.

The children had a go and produced some great drawings - they have been getting better at noticing the details.

Behaviour management

Since the start of Term 2 I have been using a behaviour management system from Michael Linsin's book "The Classroom Management Secret."  His main idea is that you need to have a clearly defined set of rules, phrased positively,  and a step by step set of consequences for not following those rules.  You need to teach the rules explicitly and also get the children to act out instances of not following the rules.  I have read elsewhere that it's a good idea to get a child to demonstrate following the rules, not following the rules, then following the rules again so that the last impression they're left with is the desirable behaviour.

My rules are:
1. Listen and follow instructions.
2. Raise your hand before you speak.
3. Keep your hands and feet to yourself.
4. Respect your classmates and your teacher.

My consequences are:
1. Warning
2. Time Out
3. Time out in another class
4. Contact home

I have displayed these rules and consequences on the board, and have made magnetic names to move through the list of consequences if need be.  I have found that having the rules clearly displayed makes me give more precise instructions like "My instruction is...sit quietly and listen for your name on the roll."  It has been good to be able to hold behaviour accountable to a specific rule - "I'm giving you a warning because you have broken our rule about keeping hands and feet to ourselves."

I have struggled when at times children have refused to go to time out in another class.  At this point I have moved them to the next step - a phone call home.  I would like to work out a better way of getting children to comply with this step if they reach this point with their behaviour.

Overall I think this system has helped me to be more consistent with noticing and managing behaviour.  I have kept a checklist of where on my chart each child is at the end of the day and this has helped me track behaviour patterns.  I will keep using this system in Term 3.

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.  

Supplementary Inquiry Team

I am part of the Topic supplementary inquiry team at my school.   We are focusing on improving the teaching of Social Sciences, Technology and Science.  In Term 2 our focus has been on Technology and the Year 2 team has been focusing on making a rain hat from recycled materials.
These are the hats the groups in my class have been making:

I like the way they are all so different.  

 The team has been looking at the skills we would like our children to have in technology, based on the "indicators of progressions by level" technology document.  We decided on:
Identify (plan, test)

Explain (explore, research)

Describe (explore)

Evaluate (compare/contrast).

We looked at our planning to work out how we could plan experiences that would develop these skills, and discussed how we would assess these skills.
While it would have been good to spend more time on the rain hat project I felt that my class successfully used the materials to create a prototype.  They loved having some freedom to explore the materials and refine their projects as they went.  Next time I would probably spend more time talking about how to identify what worked and what didn't work, and how to make constructive changes.

Testing the rain hats on a rainy day. 

Observation 29/6/17 - Maths

I watched Siale’s maths today in Room 7.  Half the class were doing repeated addition with her and the other half were working on independent problems.

First, Siale revisited the group norms and reminded the children that the norms apply to any group, like a sports team too.  She used humour - “Remember we are family, don’t let the little red hen do all the work” to reinforce this.

The class were doing a repeated addition problem.  “If Anzac had $2, then his nana gave him $2, then his uncle gave him $2, then his mum gave him $2, how much money did he have altogether?

Siale asked questions to clarify:

“What is the problem about?”

“Who is in the story?”

“What did she (Mum) do?”

“How do you know?”

“How many numbers are there?”

“What’s it called?” “Repeated addition.”

Then she said “Ok.  Let’s attack the problem.”

I liked the way she asked questions that drew out the children’s thinking.  

After the children had worked on the problem for a while, Siale rang a bell to signal it was time to stop.  I liked this non-verbal signal - it reminded me that I could use my bell for this.

I also liked her reminder for putting away the pens - “Lid on, pen down, lid on, pen down.”

Two groups presented their answers.  Siale was careful to position them so that they weren’t blocking the board.  After they had explained their answers she brought the rest of the class to the mat and talked to them about repeated addition and how that can be represented as multiplication, the ‘x’ sign meaning ‘groups of.’  She got the children to role play making 6 groups of 2, and 2 groups of 6, showing the reversibility of these factors.  

She then modelled place value in this kind of problem - “If you know that 2 + 2 = 4, you know that 20 + 20 = 40, 200 + 200 = 400 and 2000 + 2000 = 4000.  

Takeaway: From observing this lesson I saw the power of getting children to role play the problem, giving a visual representation.  It was interesting to observe Siale’s careful questioning and this has given me ideas about the way I will launch maths problems in my class.  

Observation 30/03/17 - Reading Recovery

Observation 30/03/17

Today I watched Hitha doing reading recovery with one of my lower students, Prinze, reading at Level 2.  

Prinze started off by reading a seen text - ‘My Little Cat’ while Hitha did a running record.  

She then got him to read a new text - ‘Big and Little’ - which contained that familiar word - little.  I noticed the way Hitha was careful to introduce new vocabulary like the word ‘foal.’

When Prinze came to a word he was unsure of, ‘kitten,’ Hitha covered up most of the word so Prinze could only see ‘it.’ She then added the ‘k’ sound.  I have been trying to do this more with my reading groups and have noticed children in the higher group pointing out words within words.  

Prinze then went to the whiteboard and sorted the magnetic letters for the letters he had been working on - g, o, a, b.  He read the letters and said their sounds - he got confused between the b and d so Hitha got him to practise writing upper-case and lower-case bs.

Prinze then made and broke the word ‘go’ and Hitha asked him how we could make that into the word ‘going.’ She got Prinze to write the word with the whiteboard marker and pointed out to me that Prinze has a habit of writing letters from bottom to top - this made me think I need to reinforce letter formation more in class - we do our ‘always start your letters from the top’ song but perhaps I need to make this clearer.  

They then went on to a familiar story - “My Little Cat” and Prinze chose a picture from the story to write about.  Hitha got him to say his sentence slowly before writing it - “My little cat is in the bag.” getting Prinze to hold the idea in his head for long enough to write it down.  When Prinze left too much space between words Hitha covered up his errors with stickers and got him to do it again.

Prinze practised the word ‘bag’ by putting the letters into a sound box and then had a quick practice of some high frequency words - ‘little’ ‘is’ ‘it’ ‘if.’

Hitha then introduced a new book - ‘The skier.’  She said ‘have you ever seen a movie where people go skiing?  Before you go skiing you need all your gear.”  This book had the word ‘going’ so linked back to the word Prinze had been practising.

Takeaway: I found it really helpful to watch the way Hitha introduced new texts and to hear what she had noticed about Prinze’s handwriting. The way she made connections between words that Prinze had been learning and his books was valuable and made me think about how I could make more links between the sight word songs that we do in class and the books the children read.    

Observation 8/3/17 - Reading Recovery

Today I watched Hitha doing reading recovery with one of my students, Tui, reading at level 7.  I found it really helpful to see the way she introduced a new book “Bingo’s Birthday” to him, just reading the part on each page where the character was talking, and talking about the picture.  She stopped Tui at the point where the girl was giving the dog a present and got him to predict what might be in the present then went back to the start and got him to read to check if his prediction was correct.  This established a purpose for reading - I reflected that I had been giving too much of the story away when introducing texts.

When Hitha got Tui to read a book he had previously read she got him to choose a picture to talk about - I thought this was a great oral language prompt.  Tui wrote down what was happening in the picture then Hitha turned this into a sentence strip - Munni has been recommending that I use these but I hadn’t seen them in action before so it was valuable to see. Tui reconstructed the sentence and Hitha gave it to him in an envelope to take home.  

Hitha also got Tui to sort magnetic letters on the whiteboard into groups of the same letter. I thought this would be a great activity for some of my children who are struggling with their letter recognition.  

Takeaway: Use magnetic letters as an activity to help with letter recognition.
Use cut up sentences as a way of helping with sentence structure.