Wednesday Afternoon Was Beach Day

As a reward for reaching the top of our Ladder of Kindness, Room 14 went down to Pt.England beach for the afternoon. 

The plan was simple: We'll take a couple of balls and let the kids have free play (with some adult supervision).

The result was a fantastic success. The rugby ball and football were pretty much ignored and instead the kids built sandcastles with classmates they didn't usually play with, collected shells for each other, buried friends in the sand, hunted for crabs, collected clay, investigated rock pools, tried to catch fish, looked under rocks. It was wonderful to watch.

I saw lots of real work on Key Competencies. The kids were placed in a very stimulating environment, away from the familiar playground and familiar routines and they were let loose into this new playground and had a very valuable experience. For me, it was very interesting to see how the children interacted with each other differently and made decisions about how they would spend their time on the beach.

Needless to say we're doing this again.

Gem Sharing

We were asked to share a gem, a lightbulb moment, a highlight, a moment of rapture in our inquiry over the year to date. My gem was simple. But come to think of it, it was more of a flash of realisation than a gem.

Having followed a very structured writing programme that has scaffolded the writing process for the children in my class, I have come to realise that there is a small minority on my class who would rather not follow the "recipe" they are given and would rather write to the beat of their own drum. It is these beat poets I need to consider more next year.

How can I offer them the support they need as well as provide the scaffold that the majority of the class need?

Our chat also got me thinking a lot about an area for improvement in my teaching, and that is how I use and promote the kids' blogs in class. If the blogs are meant to act as the showcase for the kids then they need to be promoted much more in class than I currently do. Perhaps if the kids really feel ownership of their blogs, then the quality of the work in it will be higher?

Things to consider:

• Blog of the week (celebrated)
• 2 weekly rotations to give FB on work (half of the class a week)  
• (could also be in writing books with the kids given time to read their feedback and and then take this feedback into their next writing as its fresh in the mind)
• Give kids time to read their own blog
• Google Docs - Comments

Inquiry Update: End of Term 3

Inquiry Update

The writing programme is cruising along. We've hit a few bumps but we're trying to find a way up the mountain.  Some very helpful feedback from Juanita Garden (AP) revealed that I had shifted the focus of my writing towards vocabulary and had removed some of the successful scaffolds that I had been using in the past.  I have since reintroduced these scaffolds and they are providing a useful framework for the children to hold onto.

It's also become clear that writing can be a tricky area to hook the children's interest in. She's a fickle mistress. One of my boys started one writing task off very slowly to the extent that I thought I would get very little from him. The following day he went for it and did his best writing to date! The praise I gave him seemed to motivate him greatly and consequently he seemed more engaged in other tasks the following day.

My learning to date would be as follows:

• make sure kids are as settled as possible before starting with clear expectations
• talk through the task before hand and input in as much awesome vocab/grammar as possible
• try to engage the children as much as possible
• scaffold the task and have that scaffold available to the kids
• monitor/help/praise/manage

I want to really try to engage the kids more to the tasks. I did a little piece of mime to motivate them to write about the 100m sprint which went down well.

Inquiry: The end of term 2

Inquiry aside, I have learned a lot about young year 3 kids and the writing process. Apart from the contexts that each child brings to the classroom on any given day that can impact on their writing on that day, I have realised that there are a multitude of teaching decisions that can affect the quality and quantity of writing that might be produced.

Some of my kids are very easily distracted which is hard to manage in a room full of 27 children. These kids benefit from a quieter learning environment. I have tried a lot to create this by thinking carefully about where the children sit but this only creates surface changes, what is needed is a "culture of quiet" (I would settle for "quieter"). I plan to get this going next term with the teacher as The Volume.

For some reason, I have shifted the focus of my writing scaffold away from helping kids produce longer texts to concentrating on the input of vocab. I need to shift back again - but keep the vocab focus there. Perhaps this will provide the framework some of my weaker writers need - not the vocab.

So going into term 3 there is going to be a big shift in the way writing is taught - primarily in the classroom noise level and the structure provided that will support my writers.

Inquiry: Week 7

Observations

Generally I am seeing an increase in confidence with the writing of some of the children. My more able writers are also producing some of the best work I've seen all year. My lower writers are not producing good work. Reasons for this are, I think, mainly behavioural and I'm trying to find a way to address these. They are given lots of scaffolding and support, but I'm seeing them surrounded by distracting children which results in no work.

My instinct tells me that I need to reconfigure the way the children sit as I have all the lower literacy kids sitting together so that I can help them. But what I am seeing is about 6 kids who aren't able to manage themselves sitting together, annoying each other and stopping each other from writing.

TBC

Inquiry: Term 2 update

The State of Affairs

So term 2 has begun and I have identified the children who need that extra help with their writing. These are the children who have more difficulty than the others in getting their ideas down onto paper. I have a list of 12 children. I am going to whittle this down to 5 in order to really see some progress. 

My feeling at the moment is that I definitely want to focus on the ESOL learner (Arthur), I also have a very able silver level reader (Ben), a very quiet one (Chris), one who seems consistently unable to complete class activities (Doreen), and another who is a total conundrum at the moment (Ed). A nut that is I think will be harder to crack than the others. I think that's enough to be going on with.

Arthur: Freezes when unable to spell a word correctly (cultural?), developing a sense of grammar.

Ben: Clever boy, a little nerdy, could be motivated more by the appeal of seeing writing on his blog.

Chris: lacks confidence, is starting to write more, responds well to PBL.

Doreen: a bit of a wild child, often ignore scaffolds and wants to write her own piece, needs assistance in crafting these though.

Ed: responds well to quiet and communication with whanau.

What's my goal with these kids?

I'd like to see them producing pieces of writing independently by the end of the term. By independently I mean without my presence over their shoulder. They may be using other scaffolds to assist them but I am hoping that they will be able to complete their expected work, essentially, by themselves.