Inquiry Focus Term 4

We are now moving toward the end of the year and many children in my class have made significant progress. There are a few children who are still struggling especially with the holiday break. The first week of school was basically trying to get back into routines and catching up where we left off at the end of Term 3.

My inquiry focus for this term is continuing to work on, mathematical terms, languages and concept especially when solving word problems. Yes, many children can solve number sentences but once given in a word problem they have difficulty comprehending, understanding the question and therefore get the answer incorrect. I find that sometimes children revert to guessing or simply shrug their shoulders. The group that I’ll be working with, will be looking at word problems, understanding and talking about what strategy they have to use to solve the problem but most importantly highlighting key words in the problem that tells us what we need to do. Once again we will be focusing on unpacking and analysing mathematical terms and language.

Inquiry Focus: End of Term 3

During the term we have been learning about retelling the story in our own words focussing on the beginning, middle and end of the story. This video clip shows what we have been doing thus far.
 
Inquiry-Reading Term 3 from Team 1 PES on Vimeo.

Reading

Inquiry Focus Term 2 July from Team 1 PES on Vimeo.

Inquiry Focus Update - Term 2

My inquiry was looking at Reading and helping children learn and spell high frequency words fast and fluency. The Explain Everything Spelling Test activity presented in my earlier blog post is used by a group of children almost everyday. The children are showing growth in confidence, they know how to spell some words fast and accurately and at the same time they know that they can search for the word on the alphabet card or ask for assistance from their peers or the teacher. They are aware of which words they know and what word to learn next.  They starting to notice shape of letters and use their letter sound knowledge to write words.
It is a difficult concept  for our little ones but they just need to keep revisiting and continue practicing until they know it and can make connections when reading these words in different contexts.

To aide this process I have started doing spelling tests. They have been successful and I have a group children who just love the competition and the rewards. They are making pleasing progress and I now I am adding words that they will need in their writing and come across in their reading. For my priority learners we have been introducing one new word per week.

"Slow and steady wins the race."

In conclusion I will continue with what I am doing and create more activities on Explain Everything to help my children move forward.

Spelling Test on Explain Everything.

Inquiry Term 2

Read read, read!

My inquiry focus for 2016 is:

Reading

Learning how to read requires several complex accomplishments. Children face many challenges as they learn how sounds are connected to print, as they develop fluency, and as they learn to construct meaning from print.

 We know from research that reading is a language-based activity. Reading does not develop naturally, and for many children, specific decoding, word recognition, and reading comprehension skills must be taught directly and systematically. We have also learned that children benefit significantly from being read to.

For my inquiry I will be focusing on a group of children reading PM books at Red, Level 3. These children are also my priority learners. I will be looking at the development of reading comprehension skills, the development of phoneme awareness, phonics, word recognition, reading fluency and getting them to read more frequently.

Inquiry Reflection

Term 4- Collaborative Inquiry

In this afternoons session our Inquiry Group discussed :

How to introduce a book when reading in a  small group and how much information do teachers need to scaffold to make text meaningful and purposeful?

Various behaviour management strategies during mat time. Children sit in a group on the mat so they are more focussed, positive praise for good behaviour, use Incredible Years strategies, point system, rewards for acceptable behaviour, children seated in a specific arrangement.

We looked at how teachers can extend vocabulary so that its relevant in multiple contexts. Encouraging children to use these words in their writing to create rich text. Quality instead of quantity.

Developing more independence in writing in Year 1. Children learning to write a simple sentence. Children say their sentence to the teacher then to a friend to help them retain the words in the sentence and then  they attempt to write some known words( high frequency words) with some support from the teacher. Teacher continue to conference with children and work in small groups.

Creating Explain Everything activities for reading levels 15 and up for Year 1 children. Looking at the progressions when creating these activities for children at this level.  Teachers in Year 2 have created some amazing resources- How can Year One teachers use these activities and change, add to it, so that it is appropriate  for our young learners.

Overall we had interesting conversations and it was good to have a  mixture of teachers from different areas of the school. Teachers were very supportive and their suggestions and comments were much appreciated. I will take on board what they have suggested and give it a go during the course of the term.

Term 3 Writing focus

This term my focus was on writing and creating rich word groups which were created around stories during our classroom brainstorm sessions. The children can access these word charts through their class site which made it much easier for children who had difficulty retaining the letters in a word.  I have also displayed them around the classroom.

Achieving my goals

This week I have been focussing on creating  worksheets for maths that children can use as a follow up activity. I have created some worksheets and laminated them so that it recycled throughout the next few weeks. Children have to type out the questions and fill in the answers. Once completed successfully they continue onto the next sheet. In this way they will be practising and consolidating their learning on a regular basis which will help them achieve their goals.

Not too young to learn......

At our last toolkits session at Stonefields, teachers from other clusters shared their experiences and success stories about children using digital devices in the classroom. I was really impressed  with how they were using their class sites for learning. I thought about it and decided to try it out with my Year 1's. So, for the last two weeks I have been teaching children how to use my class site to access their Explain Everything activities. I started out  by doing it group by group  during  my reading lessons. It took me a few days to learn how to link the Explain Everything activities and make it accessible to learners. Mrs. Belt was very supportive in helping me with my site and answered all my questions. Her video clips were very useful and I still refer to them when needed. Some of my more capable children are now using the site independently and they are now supporting the others.

The amazing thing about using the class site is that now some children have started using the site from home to extend their learning. My next focus is to encourage other parents to use the site to continue to help their children in their digital learning journey.

Reading activities.

Maths activities to practise number knowledge.

Follow up tasks assigned to groups when  children have
completed their Explain Everything activity.

Literacy with Gwenneth Phillips

I have been using Gwenneth Phillips Litearacy Programme in my class over many years. I have attended all of her tutorials and am very lucky to have received this amazing knowledge from her personally. In my classroom, I continuously  used her strategies and prompts to help children become confident and independent readers.
At Point England School we have been revisiting Gwenneth's Programme as part of our inquiry focus.
Today our focus was looking at readers between the Blue and Gold levels.
Please read through the slides and I hope it will improve your teaching practise.

From concrete to abstract

Maths group lesson:
These children are using  counters to work out a simple addition problem using the tens frame. Once they were confident using materials we tried similar addition word problems on our iPads. The children had to make two different coloured counters and then duplicate more counters to complete the word problem. Duplicating counters helped them work out how many more counters they needed for that equation. They worked really hard and they can now do this task independently as a follow up activity on their iPad.

Using different coloured counters
to work out problem on tens frame.

We practised a few word problems.

We then tried doing word problems on our iPads
Connor finds it easy to  duplicate counters and is
highly focussed on his task.

Teokatai is thinking carefully about the
amount of counters  he needs for this problem.

Izaiah worked hard and now he can do it all by himself.

Making groups of Ten

My maths focus for this group was making groups of ten and finding out how many tens and how many ones there are  in two digit numbers. We were learning to make a group of ten, then duplicating it to make more groups of ten. We went onto learning how to copy and paste shapes  from one page to another which made it much easier. At first it was quite challenging but with practise and support we got better at it.

Making patterns

The children have been learning to copy the pattern using their iPads. It involved using a number of tools and we had a good opportunity to practise using these tools and consolidate our learning. We then had to create our own pattern and explain it to a partner.

This is Kiarah's pattern. She worked really hard and had to think carefully
about how many pictures she needed to duplicate and also how to make it fit in the screen.

Rafayal created this pattern using shape, colour
and the duplicating tool.

This is Kristopher's pattern. He duplicated the pictures to create
his own unique pattern.

Rm 18's Learning Journey

Personal Inquiry-Keynote Presentation from Team 1 PES on Vimeo.

Numbers and Shapes

Today the children used Explain Everything during our Maths lesson. They practised using the shape and colour tools to make number patterns on a dice. They had to manipulate the shapes to get the correct size and then ensure that their dots could fit into that square. It was great to see the children fully engaged in their task and supporting each other and then sharing their work on the Apple T.V.
Thanks to Miss Rapold for sharing this idea with me.

Writing

My focus for the last week was for children to be able to take a photo, lock it down, draw four lines, lock that down and copy the story off the board. Some children were quite successful and are now adding a page and working at writing a simple sentence independently.

This is Kharizma's work.
This story was co- constructed by the children and teacher.

Kharizma went on working on her second page and wrote her own sentence with very little support.
She found the word " mangu- which means black in Maori" all by herself.

My next focus will be  to work on using Explain Everything, reading activities which will be more group orientated.

Inquiry 2015

How to create independent iPad learning activities for high cognitive engagement for Year 1's?

This is my first time teaching using one on one devices in my classroom. It  going to be a very busy and exciting year but we're taking it step by step with the juniors. Mrs. George comes once a week to assist us in using our iPads and we have lots of support from our colleagues.

We are presently using the Explain Everything app and learning to use the tools within this app. We started by taking photo's of our friends,  photo's around our school and now photo's of things in our classroom. 

We can't wait for Mrs. George to come in and teach us how to use a stylus and create pages within Explain Everything.