Day 5 Reading Practice Intensive

 Planning a Reading Programme

Day 4 Recap - It was so cool hearing about another participant's success with a child who doesn't usually speak.

Kelly reminded me about the drag and drop vocab task which I am keen to trial next week. 

Fiona Grant - Kaupapa and Shared pedagogy: Reading through class sites

Are learners looking at the site and seeing themselves in it and getting excited about engaging with it? Are whānau and ākonga able to locate the site in a clear and easy manner? Reminds me that I was going to make a video to share with whānau to show them how to access ours. 

Key points:

Organisation and navigation needs to be user friendly and clear. Rewindable instructional resources. I feel like I have slipped off with my site mahi, so it will be good to spend some time on this.

Key Features in Reading Site Design

Groups - Personalised, engages interest, multimodal and user friendly.

Instructions - Easy to navigate, current learning on top, historic learning is accessible, point and click instructions, teacher notes.

Learn Create Share - Learning intentions, texts, learning activities and reference material.

I like and probably need to have some site accessible stuff that ākonga can use independently and be showing cybersmart actions by being on task and engaged.

Check out the Manaiakalani Network Blogging. That has given me an idea to get ākonga to be looking at other blogs from around the motu for ideas. 

Muzify is worth having a look at. Ākonga can create a playlist related and suitable for the text they are reading. I think my ākonga would love this, especially the ones who came out with strong musical tendencies through the Multiple Intelligences test.

This looks great and I think I need to start creating and using sites for specific contexts. We are doing pūrakau later in the term, so this will be awesome. 

Designing a Reading Programme

High Quality Independent Activities

Ensure there is a link to learning intentions and working through the process within The Learning Pit. Tracking is important and keeping tabs on mahi completion. 

Backwards map from ambitious outcomes.

School Curriculum Tracking

Makes me wonder about our current coverage tracking. Always be thinking about our team, across terms and across years. Long term planning is crucial so we can plan and be well prepared with text sets etc.

What Does Integration Look Like at Your Place? Padlet (Not sure if that will work).

Check out Lopini the Legend novel. 

Teacher Timetabling

Literacy Planet - Something I need to look into.

An option for a timetable is to have 'opt-in' clinics. Conferencing is locked in and timetabled.

Do ākonga know what to get on and do when not conferencing or with a teacher?

Teacher Workbook - Checking In

I like the spreadsheet for hand it in tracking as I have found it tricky to keep up with ākonga work and if they have completed their independent tasks. 

Holey moley. This looks epic. Make a copy and have a play. This looks like it would save time so I am keen to have a go. I think I will start with the simple version and use it for Literacy and Cybersmart to start off with. That is a bit exciting and I am hoping to have a very simple one set up for next week's Literacy.

Learner Timetabling

Stocktake - Inventory and Tune Up of My Timetabling. This was a good exercise that I will come back to.

Approaches to Learner Timetables

We really want ākonga to know what they are meant to be doing so robust planning and set up is important. It allows for student agency and choice about what they are reading, allows for better management within the learning space, enables collaboration, fits in other important curriculum areas. 

FEOP - Finish Everything Off Properly - I am really keen on doing this as I'm sure ākonga have some unfinished tasks. It would seem like there is little value on it if I do nothing with it. The mahi tracker we looked at earlier will be great for this. 

Daily 5 - Includes read to self, read to someone, listen to reading, work on writing, word work. This could be weaved through my programme. 

Extended and longer tasks can be introduced. I just need to ensure that I have time allocated for work on these. 

Remember choice, collaboration and empowerment. Consistency is key!!

Bang for Buck: Digital Reading Apps - Looking forward to this part.

A note for Apps - engagement, cost, screen time and fit for purpose. 

Let's explore!!! Epic, ReadWorks, Sunshine Online and Literacy Planet. These apps offer extension and purposeful reading mileage opportunities. (Sunshine online is free for Manaiakalani schools...what??)

Epic - I have been using this. Olympic related books were set for my groups while this was our focus. Has some good reading/writing links. Use the Create Assignment section. This was good to know because I have seen it, but didn't know what it was for.

ReadWorks - Totally new to me. (Cleaner as far as advertising goes, than ReadTheory). I like the article a day because it could 

This helps with being assessment ready. I think I will ditch the start I have made with ReadTheory.

Sunshine Online - I wanted to use this and have asked the staff member who has the school login details, but i was told that we don't have it for this year. I am happy to find out today that we can get it, so i will be jumping on to that. From today, I can see that the platform looks a bit different to when I used it a few years ago. That's some good news for the day.

Literacy Planet - New to me. 

If ākonga are levelled properly, Literacy Planet will create learning tasks for them. It can be tricky because the programme isn't Aotearoa New Zealand based. 

Analogue Independent Activities - Continue with these as they are important. (See the slide for examples for the areas below).

Read Like Writers Write Like Readers Part 1

Having reading and writing completely separate, means we will miss opportunities to strengthen skills in both areas. They need to be holding hands. 

Writing links can be something about a character or writing about one aspect of what we have read. 

How can we leverage what we are reading to do some writing?

Ingredients turned into a piece of writing. For this task, we were taken through some scaffolds with creating a scene for the beginning of a piece of writing. This is mine:

The white sand was soft and warm under my feet as i made my way to my favourite spot under a coconut tree. My belly was full after a delicious buffet lunch of sapasui and sweet island fruits. The gentle lapping of the waves and the distant voices in an language that isn't my own, soothed me as I lay my snorkel gear at the foot of my lounger. 

One more week to relax and then I would be back to the giant to-do list and the voices of children filling my classroom. I took a deep, refreshing breath and smiled, glad for the decision to come to this stunning and peaceful place. 

As I dropped my lavalava and sunglasses on my lounger and stretched my  snorkel mask over my head, anticipating the wonders I was about to see, I wondered again, what would happen if I just stayed here.

Skill Builder - Inferring

Provide explicit description, modelling, scaffolding, increase in independence and encouragement to apply learning. 

There is an inference rubric which will be useful for my groups at the moment. 

We looked at the picture below and had a go at making inferences. Key part is looking at the clues. 

The Developing Inference - Sentence Stems slide is cool for getting ākonga to think about giving reasons for our inferences.

To Do: Read Teaching Inference by Dr Robert J. Marzano.

We don't make enough use of the texts that we use. We do want ākonga to copy styles of writers. Growing appreciation for the craft of writing, can be developed through using the works of others. Pay close attention to the features of the writing.

The White Tailed Spider is a good model for how to write a report. 

Read Like Writers Write Like Readers Part 2

How do we get ākonga to 'copy' styles? 

In our breakout groups, we looked for texts that have certain types of beginnings that we can use to use reading to write. 

We can also look at effective endings. 

Exploring a Taskboard

I love these tasks that have the images and then a task for ākonga to do. They are questions that would provoke thinking and sharing of opinions. I can see how these would be great to use during extended learning discussions. 

I need to bring back the book share that we did a couple of weeks ago. I got ākonga to volunteer to share and promote whatever book they were reading. I was blown away by the explanations and interest level of everyone. I witnessed one boy asking another if he could read the book that was shared, after him. One girl talked about the author and how the book related to issues in her life. I need to make this a regular part of our week, I think. 

I have a few things to focus on for the next few weeks and still quite a bit of refining to do to elevate my Literacy programme. The past couple of weeks have been great for me as far as implementing and making changes to what we do in class goes. I'm very excited about the next phase.