Inquiry Map

I had a very interesting conversation with our in-school COL teacher (Robyn Anderson) and she helped me to complete a map of my inquiry for the year. This map will help me to keep focused on my inquiry and the main focuses that I have identified for myself and my students.

Student created success criteria for recount writing

After looking at my students writing I realised that we needed to come up with a success criteria together. First we looked at an example piece of writing and looked closely at the features that were included in a good piece of writing.

Example:

We then highlighted the features that we could see and from that made a criteria that we could follow during writing time. Below is our new criteria for writing a recount.

Criteria for recount writing

1.Writing must have a title

2. When did this event take place: Yesterday... On Monday... At the weekend... In the holidays... A long time ago... Last night... After school... Today... This morning...

3. Sequence the story/event: First... Next... Then... After... Finally...

4. How it made me feel: excited thirsty sad wet happy hungry scared hot surprised tired angry cold

5. Check punctuation: . full stop ! exclamation mark ? question mark , comma ‘ apostrophe “ ” speech/ talking marks I capital letters

6. Edit my writing for spelling corrections Can I add some interesting/describing words

Update on reading and writing after testing Week 5/10

                                                                                                                                                                           

Reflections: Testing Regrouping, Refocus:  for Reading

Big improvement in reading fluency and understanding of text in all groups. Students love to read. Making reading to punctuation (full stop) and reading in two’s has really developed fluency, understanding and confidence.  The weekly sunshine classics challenge has also been a big hit with the students. Each week each group is provided with 12 new books. The challenge is to read and complete each book and the activities to 100% the student with the most read books and activities for the week receives the golden reader certificate. Each week I delete the old books and replace with new books over 4 levels (all below their guided reading level) when we need to repeat as all books have been covered but we are still having problems with the activities I delete my class, re-enter and load them in again approximately every 5 weeks. The progress I am seeing is great, well worth the extra time.

Reflections: Testing Regrouping, Refocus:  for Writing Improvement from all groups. Kamela, Aarush, Jerome and kane.M use a chart with list 1,2 and 3 spelling words blu tacked. They make their stories using the words on a whiteboard and then record the story into their book (Kane. M has his printed out which he writes over on day 2 and then dictates his story to me/t.Aide who writes his story onto paper for him to cut and paste the story into his book). A big focus on punctuation this term during shared book, poem, guided reading, shared writing has all helped develop the use of punctuation in their writing books. The students love making sentence buddies for the focus punctuation which they then put on the wall. I also have noticed that my students are writing many more ideas in their stories. Writing time is mainly free choice (5 minutes to draft picture, 15 minutes to write story, must use the whole 15 minutes, then proof- reading and editing with the teacher.) and generally all writing produced is recount. We have looked at letters and next will be acrostic poems and instructions.