My inquiry focus has changed this term from the Engage Programme to a school wide focus on Reading.
My inquiry will focus on the CoL Achievement Challenge:
#3. Lift the achievement in Reading for all students, with a particular focus on boys and Maori students, with particular focus on boys and Maori students (both genders) Years 1-13.
The knowledge of phonics helps children to work out “ how to say the printed words”. In other words, it refers to the learners understanding which letter(s) make which sound. The learner can then use that knowledge and phonological awareness to encode(spell) and decode(read) regular words.This initial learning process is the building blocks or the foundation that children need to have to begin to read on their own and build their fluency and text comprehension.
This term our school wide focus is on Reading. The focus is to lift the achievement of students who are below the expected achievement level. Teachers have been given Professional Development (PD) to support us with this inquiry.
My Focus Group:
My focus group consists of three students,(student: T, student: KM, and student: IM). Student KM and IM started at the beginning of the year and the student T started school last year in October. They are all presently reading at Level Level 5 (Red 3).
What are my learners doing during our reading session?
I noticed that:
- Learners were engaged during the orienteering of the reader and were developing the confidence to share similar experiences as in the text. They would chat/discuss about what the picture “was telling us”
- When student IM and T would come to an unknown word they would look at only the initial letter and guess the word. Eg for home, they would look at the h sound and say here because the word here is a known word.
- All three students would sometimes just appeal or stare at me silently waiting for me to tell them the unknown word.
-When I was not looking they would skip that word and continue reading or sometimes make a few muffled sounds under their breath.
- They know most of the high frequency words and would look at the pictures to support them.
- They were confident and fluent in reading a familiar reader (previous day’s reader) and read that book with fluency.
-They have letter sound confusions for e.g. b and d confusions.
- Capital letter and little letter confusions for e.g when a sentence starts with a capital letter, And This, they are unable to read the word.
Working on over the next few weeks:
- Using Gwenneth Phillips Prompt consistently:
-I will use a voice recorder to record the reading lesson to get some input or understanding of what strategies children are using, listen to ‘what am I saying’ and then plan accordingly.
