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.