Inquiry Term 3, Week 5

I am quite pleased with the progress the children are making in my focus group. They doing well in both Reading and reading writing.

Reading Data:

Writing data:

What's working so far:
-Using visuals images to encourage rich conversation, children are able to share ideas easily and confidently.
-Working on blends, middle, sounds and endings every morning or whenever the opportunity arises has been very useful. We refer to them all the time and keep adding to the wall. For example I know ing now this says ang, like bang, clang, sprang.
-Having all the words for my sentence in my head, repeat it 3 times before I start writing.
-Using knowledge of known words to write unknown words, often this is linked to reading. For       example I know come so I can write some. I know the 'ar' sound now I can write g ar d en.
-Read my story to 3 before me.
- Working with the teacher to edit my work- Capital letters, full stops are used in the right places.
-My story has a beginning middle and end.

Over the next few weeks I will continue focussing on what we're working on.
I want to focus on
-Words I can write for eg. I know come so I can write some, probably start doing spelling tests again.
- Read my work to see if it makes sense and edit my work with support from the teacher.
- Use BAR key when writing
B-better
A-add
R-replace

Inquiry Term 2 Week 5.

In my last presentation I said that I was going to investigate using Elkonin Boxes to support my students when they writing unknown words. I had a think about this and decided to put this in the later to do basket.
I wanted my learners to write a sentence. The challenges we faced were:
- remembering all the words in my sentence.
- what word do I needed to write next in my sentence
- having to look for the words in the my alphabet card and copying it in my book and still hanging onto all the words in sentence.

I decided to use DICTATION as a form of writing.
The children listened to an audio recording of a sentence and had to LISTEN to the words, SAY the words and WRITE the words.
We did this for about three weeks and now children are recording their ideas SAYING recording their sentence, LISTENING to it, REPEATING the words WRITING them down CHECKING to see if it matches to what they said - Rewindable learning.

I think this strategy is working for my students. Some evidence of this is the 6 year net testing. One of my students got tested and surprisingly did well in the dictation part of the test. The child was confident and attempted to record all the words in the sentence and wrote some sounds for unknown words.
I will continue with this for the rest of the term. I am thinking of changing my focus group for next term and want to focus on a group of learners who are capable of writing a few sentences and are working on adding more detail, rich vocabulary to their piece of work.