Posts

RPI 9: Sharing

 Connecting with Whānau My main take away from today is that connecting with school whānau is so important. We have been recently discussing our lack of whānau engagement with reading at home as a staff and need to come up with some creative ways to increase this. It has got me thinking about the types of school-wide challenges we can put together to get our whānau to engage in their child's learning more. I'll be keeping an eye on the activities people have shared in the slides we collaborated on today.  Blogging Blogging has been a bit of a mission so far this year. Mainly due to access barriers to the new edublogs accounts needing to be created and a lack of timetabling/chromebooks skills. I feel that now my students are at a point where they have a lot more digital skills to create and use google apps more confidently and so are more ready to blog. We are going to increase our blogging about learning by making sure it is timetabled and incentivised. This is also another wa...
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RPI 8: Create in Reading

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Today was a fun and interesting day focussing on Create Tasks. I feel like my students' digital skills are really coming along now and I’m excited to allow them more choice in their create tasks and tools.  AI tools are something I’ve been thinking and researching about lately and the importance of our students being able to use these not only for learning tasks at school but also to allow them the opportunity to understand how others are using them. I think it’s essential for our learners to understand these tools more because they need to be able to look at things with a critical lens more now than ever before (e.g. AI to generate photos of themselves doing something that isn’t or hasn’t actually happened). And what better way to do that than to get them using them!  Creating the One Shot Film was tricky and I cheated using three separate clips. I felt really nervous and had so many takes so this is something I need to keep working on to develop confidence. I really enjoyed...
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RPI Day 7 Critical Thinking

 Today was an excellent reminder of the ways we can engage learners in critical thinking. I especially liked the idea of providing students with provocation statements to allow students to form their own opinions and listen to other people's points of view along with their reasons. Students have lots of opportunities in our DMIC maths programme so it'll be good to get this going more in literacy.  We are about to begin a unit on narrative texts and I'd like to delve deep into the author's portrayal of characters with the 'Big Bad Wolf' being the common character of discussion. I know there are a lot of rich and enjoyable texts to support this and students should have quite a bit of prior knowledge on subject.  I'm hoping to bring back De Bono's Thinking Hats and design some modern digital reading responses and create tasks using these as a scaffold. I think we are so overwhelmed with the number of resources out there that some of these older scaffolds ar...
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RPI: Day 6

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  Vocabulary There are so many key aspects I want to make sure I include in my literacy programme for Term 3. The morphology components are covered in our spelling programme which is awesome but I want to make it more available by making a display with. the rules and sounds we have learnt already this year. I will also reintroduce a word wall to my class which I haven't done for a while.  I love the vocabulary activities that were provided today. I will be including these in my reading programme for sure! I will be doing a total overhaul of my literacy programme to make sure my students are getting best bang for their buck. I will be updating my timetable to become a revolving one to cater for those who come late or have other commitments throughout the day and making sure the timetable has ample time for things such as SSR, word work, shared reading... I rate myself a 3/5 for the vocab maintenance check.  Building Word Consciousness
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RPI: Day 5

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  Planning a reading programme: Build a consistent reading timetable that is structured and helps to build student agency (independence). I used to have this up and running so well in my classroom. This year has been full of disruption but needs to be sorted ASAP as it will help students to focus more on tasks and know where they are with their learning - giving them some structure. Language Features Toolkit - I have been building something similar this term so will be checking this out for ideas! Working Smarter - Not Harder! Create sites that are theme based where all of the activities and texts are located and set up so they can be used year after year. Use SSR time to read texts for the following week. Teacher Timetabling - how to do things smarter to have the most impact on learners. Important piece is reading allowed with competency to model to students what good reading should look like.  Non Negotiables Monitoring and tracking The accountability of task completion sho...
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RPI: Day 4

Today I learnt it was ok to have both a comprehension and decoding/fluency focus for reading. Previously I have only had one as I though having two would be a bit much. By having one of each, it is allowing for a more balanced approach. Giving 'friendly definitions' for words rather than straight from the dictionary is something I do already so it was nice to know that this was ok as sometimes I've heard people say not to 'dumb things down' for learners which I don't think this approach does but made me feel a bit uneasy about doing it.  I am excited to introduce the fluency scale to the learners as this will give a good purpose for them recording their independent reading and then listening back to them. I think this will be powerful and motivate students to want to improve how they sound as a reader.  I will also use the KWL with my learners. I have never used it to connect with video or text before so this will be fun. I will be sharing the LtR protocol tool ...
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RPI 3: Homework

 This term the reading programme has started well. I am continuing to read The Twits to the students and this is integrated into our writing programme. We have been focussing on descriptive language and students have produced a character description of Mrs Twit which they have been very excited about.  The texts that have been selected for the students to read have been topic based - space. Our inquiry question is 'Where else other than Earth can humans survive?' I have had positive feedback from the students about the texts this week. They are excited about the topic and are enjoying learning new facts about planets such as Mars. One text in particular titled 'My 'What if..' Planet (a poem) has inspired students to design their own planet. This has paved the way for a whole class create task in response to the topic and reading materials.  I have just introduced students to recording themselves reading as an independent tasks. I have found this is handy for sending...
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