Will an increased combination of rich classroom talk and deliberate acts of teaching of spelling and punctuation, accelerate shift across all learning areas?

TEACHING analyse and appropriately use assessment information which has been gathered formally and informally

After the writing test it highlighted that my students had a lack of comprehension as to the use of punctuation. We were also lacking in ideas and spelling of lists 1,2,3 …

Design for learning Conceptualise, plan and implement an appropriate learning programme

Focus 1:

Increase our spelling accuracy.

Provide the first 3 lists on the board, play word swat games, include these words in our reading programme (read, speak,write,find)

Have a weekly 10 minutes of writing down as many words as you can correctly.

Record this in a graph and present weekly to the students - with certificates for bronze, silver, gold

Focus 2:To create a better understanding of what punctuation is and how to use it correctly.Use sentence buddy to help develop this skill in a fun way. Make connections in big book, poems, guided reading. Add punctuation to the board alongside the list 1,2,& 3 words.

                          

Focus 3:

To produce more ideas in our writing.

Every 2nd week to provide a picture that the students can add other pictures to for example “My day at the Beach”

Lots of opportunity for oral language to discuss what they have experienced when they went to the chosen place.

Make the picture on their ipad and label what they have added.

Talk about their picture again through the shared TV

Write a recount together including what they added/found at the chosen place

Separately go off and write their own recount using their created picture to help them.

Did we make enough progress

Reading ability - Feb

Student	A	B	C	D	E
Reading level	2	2	2	2	2
Reading age	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0
Chronological age	5.04	5.03	5.04	5.04	5.04
Errors	13	25	10	14	40
Self corrections	0	0	0	0	0
Accuracy    %	75	52	81	73	18
Comprehension of text	3/4	2/4	2/4	1/4	0/4

Reading ability - Nov

Student	A	B	C	D	E
Reading level	10/12	10/12	7/9	10/12	7/9
Reading age	5.9	5.9	5.6	5.9	5.6
Chronological age	6.0	5.11	6.0	6.0	6.0
Errors	5	15	2	14	23
Self corrections	0	0	0	0	0
Accuracy    %	96	89	99	90	83
Comprehension of text	5/5	5/5	5/5	5/5	3/5

What they are reading this week - should be 12/13/14 at end of year 1

I feel this is due to setting up the system of 3 levels per week both with teacher and on sunshine classics and everyday checking sunshine classics and working on difficult areas with the group.

Writing ability - Feb

Student	A	B	C	D	E
e-asttle	below	below	Well below	below	below

Writing ability - Nov

Student	A	B	C	D	E
e-asttle	at	at	at	below	at

My students really enjoy writing now. They know the system we use and the Yolanda cards and the scrap piece of paper have been amazing.

Verbal communication

Using the flying fives room, the all important microphone pen, and the questioning cards - tell me more… combined have grown my students confidence to share their work and ideas verbally in pairs/ groups and whole class.

What would I do the same:

• Yolanda Phonics/word card
• scrap paper
• writing every day - modelled
• 5 texts per day - as whole class
• sharing circle every day
• Begin year in Room 10 at least 1 session per week
• 3 levels of reading per week
• Sunshine classics

What would I change:

• Provide updates to the students more frequently - as graphs
• Provide the marking matrix for e-asttle
• Gold medals each day for reading/writing
• Split the writing modelling sessions sooner
• Share a sunshine classics book each week as a whole class

Plan to reach reading targets

It is now term 4 and a big push is needed to hit our reading targets.  

Big questions:

What is required to hit our targets.

To hit our targets we need to move through the reading levels.

How can my practice change to help students achieve these targets.

I need to provide more opportunities for reading, that is with the teacher, in groups, with buddies and independently.

I need to provide a larger range of texts e.g. not just covering yellow 1 (level 6) and then moving onto yellow 2 (level 7) a few weeks later. I will begin to provide 3 levels of reader each week to be read with myself e.g. Yellow 1,2 & 3 (Lv 6,7 &8)

Running along side this I will provide 3 sunshine classic books per day at the different levels and on a daily basis check the reading results. When I notice similar errors I will use this to guide my teaching practice. Once a week as a group they will also read a chosen book and complete the activities during guided reading time with the teacher.

After each guided reading session the students will go and read their book again as a group.

On Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays we will buddy read with room 2.

Rethinking my practice

My team leader shared her folder with me from a recent workshop from the Auckland literacy Expo for teachers which involved exploring the writer in the reading and the reader in the writing.

The Effective literacy practice in years 5-8 have undertaken studies that show that teachers who have a firm grasp  of the reciprocal relationship between writing and reading and who continually make explicit connections to their students between reading and writing are the teachers whom exemplify 'best Practice'.

In Room three during big book, poem and guided reading we continually consider grapho-phonic sources of information when both reading and writing. We are also looking to locate the different types of punctuation and how these change our understanding of a text.

We also look at features in writing such as "describers" and how these help the reader to get an image in their head of the characters etc. Here we are looking at our poem for the week and finding the describers that the author has used. 

After time with reading recovery

Since hearing from the reading recovery team I have been implementing the findings. One very valuable tip was for at writing time. We have always shared our story before writing, planned through the use of a picture and then come back together to write a shared story together before the students then go off independently to write their story. Big difference not only do we use our Yolanda cards but as shared by the reading recovery team we provide a piece of scrap paper for the unknown words. this allows students to write the sounds they can hear for the whole word before entering this into their book. We have been following this structure for the past 5 weeks and here are the results that I would like to share:

                                                                      BEFORE

                                                                      AFTER

BEFORE

                                                                      AFTER

BEFORE

                                                                          AFTER

                                                                    BEFORE

                                                                     AFTER

                                                                    BEFORE

                                                                      AFTER