– Reflection on past two weeks in relation to this kaupapa.
What am I proud of? I’m really proud of my taskboard designed mahi and the way that my crew have positively taken to it. They are building skills around self management and organisation/ownership of their own mahi.
What was challenging? A big spanner was thrown in the works in regards to some health complications at home meaning that I haven’t had a lot of time in class.
What helped me achieve my goals (homework)? – one thing I think has been really helpful for my practice recently has been the fact I have intentionally been trying to strip everything back and focus on a few quality tasks rather than trying to speed through lots and lots of mahi with my class. I noticed that when provided many different tasks I would get students blitzing through and not doing their best OR being so overwhelmed they didn’t know where to start. Reducing the amount of tasks in front of my kids has really allowed them to dig deep and create some really cool mahi.
What do I need help with? – I would love support for better linking of my students PAT data with my text selection
Today’s programme has been very busy, which has been great but always leaves me feeling like I’m not doing the best I could be for the kids I have in front of me. I know this is partially down to time constraints and that the course is primarily aimed at primary school level but I feel waaaaaay out of my depth at times too!
Below is a collection of the key things that stood out for me today. Assorted quotes, resources and models useful in the structure and delivery of small reading group based mahi.
“Teachers are always watching children; but observations can be random and diffuse. You always gather information about whether children are behaving appropriately, finishing their work, or performing tasks accurately. But you need to make your observations far more focussed and productive when it comes to noticing the precise behaviours that relate to literacy learning…”
Fountas & Pinnell, 2017, p. 215
I really liked the observation sheet for Listening to Reading. I think this would be really interesting to complete with our Y9/10 students to see how proficient they are with their reading out loud.
I have had the idea for a while now of setting up a reading out loud challenge using Dr Seuss pukapuka. It came to me after my boy was getting me to read Fox in Socks one day and I could not for the life of me get through reading the whole thing without at least a couple of funny errors.
Speed reading this and scoring kids on pauses, errors etc while also doing so in a non-threatening way could be quite a funny task.
