Inquiry Term 2 Week 10

I have changed my focus group. I have five children in my focus group and they are all girls. Three of the girls have already turned 6 and they can write a sentence independently. They can spell many basic everyday words and are attempting to use their letter sound knowledge to write some difficult and tricky words.  One of the girls is reading at Green 1 L12 and the other 4 girls are reading at Blue 2 Level 10. They work well together however there are 3 girls who are quiet and shy. When prompted will share their ideas. They can have conversations and share ideas freely when in a small group.

Over the last few weeks I have been using pictures from books as a resource to help my class with their writing. I select images that will hook the children, engage them to have a rich conversation.
Sometimes images are from a story we read. I have been using Dr. Janie Van Hees gifting rich vocabulary word groups.
We start with a  visual prompt:

Who is in the picture- characters and giving them names- Baby bear, Mother bear, Mother hen
Where are they- in the deep dark forest, warm nest.
What happened- they are hungry, feeling scared.

I have also talked to the class about a BME:
Your story must have a:
Beginning
Middle
End
Some children in the class are beginning to understand what this all means.
Over the last few weeks my focus group with my support have been writing sentences with a BME.


Findings:
When writing independently:
I am noticing:

Ideas being repeated  - words being repeated,
Confusions and therefore lots of mistakes- children keep changing their ideas or cannot hold onto initial idea or does not have that entire idea in their head before they start writing.
They dive straight into what happened-  for eg- she is hungry.
It has to be their idea and I need to give them waiting time which can be a bit difficult with 14 other children in the classroom.

Next steps:
Work in small groups or I walk around as everyone writes.
Continue using our i-Pads as a resource to record our sentences- Say my sentence- listen to it and now write the words for my sentence.
Children that have a good memory can work on holding one part of their story in their head.

Activities in the classroom:
Play memory games.
Puzzles
I spy games

Focussing Inquiry Hypothesise

Through further focussing my inquiry I am fairly confident that my hypothesise data showed children struggled to count from 1-5. After further focus my hunch is that children have not experienced learning, they have limited vocabulary, limited language to say back to me, limited vocabulary and ability to connect language and concepts and most importantly they lack the confidence to share their ideas.

Focussing Inquiry Reflection

This year I have older Year One children, many of them started school last year. The children that I am looking at as my priority learners started school in June, August and late November 2016. My reflection on focussing inquiry is based on their JAM data that was done in November 2016. The data showed that children were working on, developing one to one matching for numbers 1-10 using mathematical equipment. They had difficulty identifying numbers from 1-5 and were inconsistent with their counting. I had conversations with their past teachers, their parents at meet the teacher and used my OTJ from my group lessons to gather evidence about there progress.

Looking at all this evidence and information I think that the problem is that they have difficulty understanding numbers and their value. They may identify the number 2 by rote learning but cannot show using equipment what 2 looks like what does 2 mean.

Therefore I have decided to target these children and work on sequential counting, developing one to one matching for numbers 1-5 then 1-10 using a variety of resources starting from the concrete and slowly moving to the abstract.