Reading Practice Intensive - Day 9

 

Day 9 - Sharing Reading

We began today's session looking at our Homework tasks and as always, it was good to see other's ideas and what tasks they had created.  You learn so much, and can "Stalk and Steal" (my new catch phrase!)

Naomi explained that today's session was not only about Sharing in Reading but also about tying it all together and looking at the big picture now that we were at the end.  

Fiona Grant was with us today as Dorothy is away having a well deserved break.  Fiona talked about in the early days of Manaiakalani they wanted a way for learners to have an audience through which to build a sense of self worth.  That authentic audience could be - Peer-to-peer, Class, School, Whānau, Local community, and The world.  I liked the idea Fiona shared about doing blog posts about book recommendations and having a holiday challenge to get both reading happening and blogging happening over the 2 week holiday break.  

Fiona also talked about how blogging does not need to be the student's finished work - students can 'share to learn' and 'share to finish learning.'

Class sites and class blogs are the primary online space for learners to access their learning, teachers share their reading programme designs with other teachers. This is how programme routines and innovations can be made  are visible to other teachers. All teachers have our favourite teachers that we “stalk” and "steal" from regularly! 

We recapped the Manaiakalani Pillars of Reading Practice. There are five core pillars. On Days 1-3 of the RPI we focussed on pillars 1 and 2: Planning for Ambitious Outcomes and Planning to Use Diverse Texts. We continued to focus on the second Pillar, but with a more detailed examination of Guided Reading. Regular and systematic Guided Reading offers particular benefits for teaching, observing and scaffolding learners to develop skills and strategies to better comprehend text with teacher support. 

The Manaiakalani Reading Model pivots on Teaching Learners to think and question. What Teachers do - Plan for ambitious outcomes, Plan to use diverse texts, Teach learners to think and question. What Learners do -  Think and question, Design rich creative experiences, Enable opportunities to share.  The use of the word question is a deliberate reference to criticality and to the skills of a critical thinker.   Today we looked at how we might ‘share’ this thinking and questioning.

Students “participate enthusiastically in reading communities, reading and discussing different kinds of texts…” (Te Mataiaho)  Communities are commonly defined by their shared interests, values, contexts, and participation.  Therefore classroom reading communities foster shared contributions of akonga, kaiako, whanau, & a wider online community, in valued reading practices.

Sharing builds reading communities.  For learners to participate enthusiastically in reading communities, in and beyond the classroom, sharing and shared practices need to be established, maintained and refined. In the context of 1:1 classrooms these fundamentally include: visibility, feedback & reflection, collaboration, and whānau engagement.

We need to plan to share or it won't happen. What will they share? When will they share? And how will they share?

(McGurk, 2014)

What did I learn that could improve my capability and confidence in teaching reading? 

Thinking ahead to next term or even next year - what do we want our students to blog? What are our 'big ticket items' - Response to text, Vocab follow up tasks, or Reading for enjoyment challenges? Over a fortnight how many posts do we want blogged? Do we break this down to subject areas, and have a minimum number of posts for Writing, Reading and Maths? We also need to teach our students how to 'tag' their blog posts with labels.

How can we get our Year 3s up-skilled on these things before the start of next year?

We covered Feedback today. there are some good resources for teachers on this website. 

Feedback is information provided (by the teacher, a peer, a book or computer programme, or an experience) about aspects of a student’s performance or the knowledge they have built up from a learning experience. It is important to note that the research demonstrates that it is not the quantity of feedback that makes a difference but the quality of the feedback, and the ways in which students are supported to engage with, respond to and utilise the feedback to improve. (Absolum, M - Clarity in the Classroom). Learners should use feedback to confirm, fine tune or restructure existing knowledge, beliefs and strategies.

Feedback Types:

• Evaluative (summative) - involves making a judgement (e.g. “That’s right!”; score; level)
• Descriptive (formative) - gives specific information of where learners are at and describes gaps
• Generative (formative) - feedforward or guidance for improvement

Feedback Givers:

• Teacher
• Peer-to-peer
• Whānau/aiga

Feedback Modes:

• Oral - (e.g. Guided Reading; Shared Reading)
• Written - (e.g. independent response activities; blogs)
• Multimodal - (e.g. Motes; audio; screencast)

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

I need to ensure that we use rubrics and success criteria more frequently - it makes visible what learners will be able to do to achieve the learning objectives.  Success criteria describe how students will go about achieving a learning intention or how they will know when they have learnt it. The teacher's criteria for making judgments about work, or understanding so learners can gauge achievement or quality of the outcome.  Co-construction with learners to promote ownership of the learning, by being self-evaluative as they are working, or when assessing completion or outcome. This can focus on the - Process, Product or the Disposition.

We recapped our session using Mahi Trackers or Hand-it-in Sheets.  This is something I tried, unsuccessfully, in Term 2 as an A3 paper table.  I would like to try to use it again now that the students are a bit older and in good routines. We talked about and shared what different teachers also used to track their commenting on blogs and student work.  Hapara can be used to check easily which students are blogging frequently (or not) and commenting.

Below: Almarode, J., Hattie, J., Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2021). Rebounding and reinvesting. Where the evidence points for accelerating learning. A GOLD paper. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Retrieved from https://us.corwin.com/ en-us/nam/white-paper-reinvesting-and-rebounding

Learners need sharing opportunities to read and respond to texts in collaborative ways that include:

• Listening, reading and responding to each other’s reading (e.g. paired /buddy reading; recording)
• Discussing and co-creating responses to texts 
• Blog commenting
• Peer to peer feedback
• Sharing the texts they’ve enjoyed

I have recently begun to offer more opportunities for students to collaborate during 'Create' tasks - this is one of the areas of weakness picked up in our school Reading Observations in Term 2.  Today we discussed it could be as simple as just saying "collaborate with a buddy to..." or "have a discussion with a buddy about..."

What did I learn that could be shared within my wider community, with either colleagues, or whānau/aiga? 

I really enjoyed the segment today on 'Sharing with Whānau' as I feel that this is something that needs an overhaul.  We, like many schools, struggle to get whānau to engage with learner's blogs and leave comments. They may well view them and the learning but without the evidence of a comment we are not to know this.  I feel this puts more pressure on classroom teachers to comment on learner blogs to make the purpose of blogging worthwhile.  I know our junior classes who have hub blogs have the same thoughts on this - why do we spend so much time adding to the blogs each week if no one comments.

I liked the activity we did for getting whānau involved - we need to make deliberate opportunities to invite or include whānau.  We do some schoolwide things that have/are successful - cultural buddy reading, a parent category for our Book Week design a book cover competition with Pak'n'Save vouchers as prizes - but we need to be looking for opportunities to do more.  I loved the idea of whānau taking photos of their child reading to a pet or a soft toy, and the students bringing this back to school.

Bringing it all together: Layering opportunities to share across the reading programme:

• Diverse texts and practices - guided/shared/independent/buddy reading, text sets, cross-curricula links, windows/mirrors/sliding doors, reader profile survey 
• Vocabulary - pre-reading, during reading, after reading
• Thinking - literal/interpretive/evaluative, figurative/creative, reflective

Next big challenge - sustainability! Putting all of this new Reading Practice Intensive knowledge into place and continuing to do so.  Sarah and I will be presenting to a staff meeting next term to share the "gems" that we haven't already shared with our own teams.  Hopefully another two colleagues get the opportunity to do this programme in 2025.

Thanks to Naomi, Georgie and Anna - it's been fantastic!

Term 3 Reader Profile Survey

This week I have surveyed my students once again and I have compared these results to those from Term 1.  Although I didn't managed to capture information from all students within my hub it ended up being the same sample size as Term 1.

The thing that has surprised me the most are the similarities in the results from Term 1, with little change at all.

Slightly more students like reading books at school - which is a positive change. Although less students are currently reading a book for enjoyment.  I actually spoke to my own Reading class about this today when we visited the school library as some didn't want to get any books out from the library.  I asked them what they read when it is silent reading time, and they said they "read" a book from the class library shelves (but possibly only browse through it rather than read it).

This made me interested in whether student's attitudes towards Reading had changed since Term 1.  These show similar data from Term 1 to Term 3.

It was reassuring to see that students are choosing to read out of school and only 6 students "never" have a favourite time to read.

This is a Word Cloud to represent the types of books the students like to read in Term 3.  The most common answers were novels, picture books, chapter books and fiction books,  This is followed by comics/graphic novels, fantasy books and scary books.

Reading Practice Intensive - Day 8

Day 8 - Create in Reading

I have been looking forward to this day's content, and now that it is almost over I am looking ahead to what exciting things I can plan for my students in Reading.  Today three of my cohort joined the Tuesday cohort as we have one of our ministry teacher only days this Friday.  The Tuesday cohort was very welcoming and had a good vibe.

We shared our Homework tasks and how they had gone first.  A challenge for many with all of the sickness around, both with teachers and mentors.  I have to catch up with my mentor as I haven't had a chance in the last couple of weeks.  I discussed the frustration that although my students can engage in a great extended learning discussion about a text, when they come to complete Response to Text activities they struggle to capture what was discussed in their answers.  Kiri suggested two tips that may help - (1) Have a teacher aide scribe everything said in the discussion (out of view) that can be referred back to, and (2) Use an online voice recorder and record the discussion audio for the students to check back on.

What did I learn that increased my understanding of the kaupapa and pedagogy of the Manaiakalani Reading Programme ?

It is always great to hear from Dorothy each RPI session that we have - today she was joining us from her car! She began by asking us, "Do you do your best thinking while your hands are creating? 

Dorothy talked, quite obviously, about the foundation goal of the Manaiakalani programme is to motivate our learners to engage with the curriculum (the "hook").  We want learners to not only have have opportunities to create digitally but also to create across the spectrum of disciplines that include art, music, movement, drama, and all forms of making. It is important to capture these creative artefacts and responses using the affordances of digital technologies. We can do this in ways we never could before. 

Dorothy talked about SiSoMo (Sight, Sound and Motion).  The more senses you can engage in creativity the more deeper you can go with consolidating the learning. With digital tools, we can create like never before. Not only can we use ever increasing ways to harness digital innovation in creative ways, but we can digitise and share what we create with our hands in the ‘real world.’  

It was interesting to find out that OECD's Pisa tests rank New Zealand's 15-year-olds 5th in the world in creative thinking (out of 81 countries).  In the same round of tests New Zealand ranked 10th in reading, 11th in science and 23rd in maths - these scores all show drops.  Interestingly Singapore was number one in all subjects.

AI was also discussed - how will this impact on our creativity.  We still want our young people to be creative without using AI.  Dorothy shared a few more AI tools for me to check out.

What did I learn that could improve my capability and confidence in teaching reading?

Today we had lots of chances to create resources that we can use in our Reading programmes.

The first activity we did was using an unillustrated poem and recording ourselves reading a paragraph and then adding the audio and an AI image to illustrate it.  This was really amazing when we saw what each other had created - all so different.  What do you think?

Mayer’s principles of multimedia learning provide a blueprint for how to structure multimedia elements to maximise learning outcomes.

Creativity empowers learning - Digital technologies empower creativity.

We revisited the SAMR model (which I often think critically about when I see some colleagues teaching and learning).  And I often need to remind myself not to slip back into bad habits of "substitution" when organising activities for students.  We should all be striving to be in the top section - Modification and Redefinition.

We added examples of how we have designed opportunities for learners to Create after reading using multimedia ideas (see below) and this will be a valuable resource.  It is great to look at other people's ideas and recall that I used to do some of these things - but why did I stop?!

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

We looked at short responses to texts - before, during or after reading.  We looked at "tighter" and "looser" design options for responses.  We had an opportunity to create a response task and link it to a register (which is another fantastic resource to use with my learners).  I created this prediction activity on a slideshow which I plan to add to Explain Everything as well.

It was good to revisit some of the Create tools that I haven't used for a while.  My students are loving using Canva at the moment.  I hope to teach them how to use a variety of new tools and then offer them the choice for what tool they would like to use for response tasks - Storyboard That, Book Creator, Pixton, making quizzes.  I regularly "magpie" ideas from other school's blog posts to use in my programme.  

After looking at our Uru Manuka Cluster data last week for our Reading Observations, we certainly need to focus on adding some choice into follow up tasks and opportunities for students to collaborate during follow up tasks.

It was great to have Fiona Grant join us today and run through was a one-shot film is.  How cool would it be to have a green wall in our learning space to use as a green screen?  Maybe a conversation with the caretaker coming up!  Then we created our own one-shot film! I must have missed the memo to have a children's book with me.  After a mad panic around my house I managed to find one of my books from the beginning of my teaching career to use.  What a hilarious activity watching all the one minute videos at the end!  My Puppy and Me by Mercer Mayer was my one-shot film, which I will not be posting on here!

What did I learn that could be shared within my wider community, with either colleagues, or whānau/aiga? 

Our last task for the day was a reflection actiivty on Padlet where we needed to consider "What do you need to adjust?"  We reflected on the day and identified areas of Create pedagogy to further develop in these categories - Opportunities, Collaboration, Design, Choices, Display/Digitalise(Share).  We then added our next steps to the Padlet.

Reading Practice Intensive - Day 7

 Day 7 - Thinking

We are now into the final term of the Reading Practice Intensive with 3 sessions to go - Thinking, Creating and Sharing.  To quote Dorothy "it's always fun to be thinking about thinking!"

We began by going into our smaller breakout groups and looking through our Homework tasks.  This is always a great part of each session as you learn so much from other participants.  It is nice to reflect about what we are proud of, have found challenging, found helpful and what we might still need support with.

What did I learn that increased my understanding of the kaupapa and pedagogy of the Manaiakalani Reading Programme ?

Dorothy spoke to us about the 21st century skills (Critical Thinking, Communication, Creativity and Collaboration) that are essential for our young people in the world we live in.  She talked about how the Manaiakalani cybersmart programme supports the development and growth of thinking - especially in the Smart Learners and Smart Media areas.  Information should be read critically.  Smart Learners critically examine information online.  

Dorothy is always great at sharing gems of knowledge - whether it is a new website or app or something that I have seen before but had forgotten about.  She reminded me about the Cybersmart Challenges (Fake News, Media Bias, Copyright) cover what is true and what is fake.  I am excited to try the new Adobe Podcast and love the feature of removing background noise and being able to edit the audio like a doc.

What did I learn that could improve my capability and confidence in teaching reading?

We looked at the Levels of Thinking.  Learners should have opportunities to develop awareness of the ‘levels of thinking’ involved in being a good reader. 

At the literal level (‘reading on the lines’) information is stated directly and can be located at one or more places.

At an interpretive level (‘reading between the lines’) readers have to use their reasoning and critical analysis skills to work out an implied or suggested meaning (not directly stated). Due to the interpretive nature of the meaning making, care needs to be taken to uphold the integrity of the author’s intention by aligning as much as possible with the evidence available. 

At the evaluative level (‘reading beyond the lines’) readers are making judgements concerning values, correctness or issues of wider social significance (and relating these to their own contexts and lives).

We then looked at these levels using the text "Jump" as well as a YouTube clip of someone bungee jumping and a poem.

We revisited Blooms, Do Bono's Thinking Hats and Solo Taxonomy and how these show a progression from lower order (below the line) to higher order (above the line) thinking. Above the line or “higher order” thinking is more complex, requiring more ‘brain power’. Part of the reason for this complexity is the need to hold more things in one’s head at a time. Another is the 'higher' you go the more abstract (less concrete) the thinking. This is also in part to help hold more things in our head ideas are conceptualised in abstract terms to group, categorise and generalise.

We discussed the 'higher-order thinking skills' like analysing, evaluated and creating. Analysis can be seen as the opposite of summarising.  It was a chance to think about the difference between interpretive questions and evaluative questions,  It can be challenging to be sure of the difference between these, but I like the point that Naomi made about evaluative questions often having an element of interpretation within them. 

Students need to use "hawk eyes" to zoom in and zoom out at a text.  

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

We watched a video about how to annotate a PDF - I didn't know you could do this, so this is a great tool that I can use.  Here is a video I found to use to teach my students how to do this on their chromebooks.

We talked about using the TSM materials for guidance about the figurative language (which I already do) and we had some time to create reading responses for a text that we brought along to use today.  We also talked about practising visualising and interpreting using images - literal verses abstract.  Comparing one thing to another involves thinking about unusual comparisons and why author’s use these comparisons to invoke ideas, emotions, and other features like mood and atmosphere.

We read a poem "The Cave" which was just the text (without showing the illustration until later). What images or pictures did the poet create in our minds? What was the person doing in the poem? How did we know?  After a discussion you would show the students the poem in the school journal and ask - Was this the kind of image of the cave you were thinking of in your mind? 

We learnt about how we can use a provocation - present it, discuss it and then ask who agrees or disagrees.

This was the provocation from the text "The Jump"...

A provocation, dilemma or perspective can also stimulate higher order thinking through discussion. Collective thinking about a problem can support learners to get to “the bottom of an issue” together: many heads are better than one.

As a teacher I should be looking for opportunities to challenge and resist.  

We had an opportunity to create a provocation from the text that we brought along.  My text was "No Girls Allowed" so I chose "Rugby should only be played by boys!"  Questions to follow would be - What character do you relate to?  Have you ever felt like this character? Who is the author? What message is the author trying to share with us?  Why was the text created? What does this text say about your gender roles?  Follow up ideas - Re-write the text so it has a different ending, Make a petition, Write a letter to the tournament organisers.

What did I learn that could be shared within my wider community, with either colleagues, or whanau/aiga? 

Once again I have a lot of great ideas and resources from today's session.  Lots to share back to my team at school, and lots to get stuck into and use in my Reading programme.  It was great today to have so much time to create a resource based on the text we brought during the day, and for it to be be complete and ready to use now.

Reading Practice Intensive - Day 6

 

Day 6 - Vocabulary (& Decoding)

Naomi was super excited about today's session.  She told us there would be lots of resources gifted to us and it was one of her favourite days of the whole RPI programme.  She said it was going to be a big day - but a fun day - and she was not wrong!

We began by going over the homework tasks from the last session.  I have few to complete but will catch up before the end of the term.  I was proud to share one of my students writing from our "Great Beginnings" work on Day 5 linking Reading and Writing.  One of the teachers in my breakout group shared about her students using Craiyon AI to illustrated their writing so I had a quick play with that and here it is.

What did I learn that increased my understanding of the kaupapa and pedagogy of the Manaiakalani Reading Programme ?

Dorothy talked about vocabulary being the key to learning, how vocabulary growth is directly related to achievement, and vocabulary size in kindergarten predicts the ability to learn to read.  She shared some research from the Welcome to School project in Tamaki, Auckland.  On both assessments of Concepts About Print and Letter ID 5 year olds in Tamaki are significantly below National averages. In other words, most children in Tamaki start school without the developmental and communication skills needed to achieve at expected levels.  

I know there are similar issues at my own school with some children coming to school with significant gaps in their vocabulary evident in the 5 year old entry testing of their oral language. On checking our school SMS our 5 year olds that have started school this year have an oral language age range of as low as 2 years 5 months to 8 years 1 month.

Vocabulary improvement plays a critical role in mediating disadvantage in oral language development and early literacy. Vocabulary helps with development of oral language development and early literacy.  Digital tools can also assist with this.

Dorothy also gave Google Documents a plug - they are under used.  I didn't know about Smart Chips - so I will have a wee bit of sandpit time with these later on.  Thanks Dorothy!

What did I learn that could improve my capability and confidence in teaching reading?

A learner’s vocabulary is the strongest predictor of reading comprehension and by Year 5 70% of reading problems are related to vocabulary.  

The 4 Key Approaches to Explicit Vocabulary Instruction - Decades of research maintain a focus on systematic planning and teaching for: 

• Building word consciousness
• Deliberate, robust teaching of words 
• Skills for cracking unfamiliar words
• Morphology (incl. its importance in subject disciplines)

The biggest thing is don't leave it to chance!

5 Principles of Robust Vocabulary Instruction:

1. Direct explanation (in a learner friendly way)
2. Thought provoking connections to meanings in students’ lived experiences
3. Playful use of words (e.g. word consciousness)
4. Interactive engagement
5. Follow up (multiple encounters) 

We revisited this Vocabulary Cake visual again:

It is the Tier II words we want to increase knowledge and understanding of.

I learnt about the "Lexical Bar" concept - David Corson (1984). This bar is essentially a threshold between common words in English that are usually learned through oral communication during childhood and the academic written language in English learning educational settings. This bar, Corson observed, is easily crossed by some students, but for others, it is a daunting task. For almost all students, crossing the lexical bar requires instruction that explores the lexical nature of academic written language, which includes vocabulary instruction.

What happens when we "raise the lexical bar too much" without providing sufficient support?

Beyond the earlier successes in learning to read, all readers (even adults) encounter more complex texts and unfamiliar words that require  strategic decoding. 

We also went back and looked at our teacher workbook spreadsheet at the learner progressions for each level of learner.  Level 2 and Level 3 have Phonology & Spelling seperate, whereas Level 1 has them incorporated at each reading level.

QAR (Question Answer Relationship) is a question answering and generating strategy that improves comprehension by helping students understand the different types of questions.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

There were so many great resources that I can use with my students straight away, I'm not sure where to start.  Here is a few of the many I have ready to go on my Drive:

• Spotlight graphic organiser - before and after reading a text.  It will show the teacher what vocabulary needs to be focused on.  Focus on semantics (word meaning), orthography (spelling) and phonology (pronunciation).
• Resource Register spreadsheet - Scattergories List Generator link
• Rebus puzzles
• Using School Journal Teacher Support Material vocabulary lists
• Interactive, Robust approaches templates
• Lots of ideas on developing understanding of phonemes, syllables, prefixes/suffixes, base/root words

What did I learn that could be shared within my wider community, with either colleagues, or whānau/aiga? 

Like I have before I will be sharing a "highlights reel" with my team back at school on Monday and further unpacking at our school holiday team meeting.  Here are just a few things I will be discussing:

• Phonological awareness screening tool
• Decoding progressions and self assessment tools
• Questioning Matrix

RPI: Adjustment Reflections

As a result of our last PRI session around planning a programme, we were asked to implement some timetable changes and focus on high expectation independent activities. 

Timetabling

With having a Year 3 and 4 group of learners I have a big range of Reading abilities from Level 9/Blue right through to a group of very capable students reading at the beginning of Curriculum Level 3.  With a Junior teaching background I always see my most needy students every single day as they have the greatest needs.  We have an 75 minutes timetabled for our Reading session with the first 15 minutes being our Read & Feed time where I read our class novel.  I have 4 Reading groups and I see 3 groups each day.  Sometimes I might be fortunate to have a teacher aide or student teacher on placement which means I can get them to take my fourth group.  Each fortnight I also visit the school library with my Reading class and on that day I only see my lowest Reading group.  My learners are in very good routines and know the expectations that I have for them in Reading time.  They follow the rotation of activities on their group slideshow and know that I will be checking in with them and checking up that any independent tasks have been completed to the standard expected.

Reading Apps

Since beginning RPI I have removed my 'Can Do' activities from my group slideshows and put them separately on my Reading site.  With a Year 3 and 4 group of learners I have both iPads and chromebooks so use a mixture of different independent activities on devices.  We use Epic, Studyladder (with tasks set to meet group focus areas), Word Chain as our main apps.

Turn It In Sheet

At the start of Term 2 I tried using a paper version of a Mahi Tracker with an A3 printed spreadsheet.  The reason I opted for a paper tracker was because I have some students on iPads and some on chromebooks.  I found the Mahi Tracker didn't work as well as I had hoped.  Some students couldn't track along from their name and down from the day of the week (or task) and would tick another student's box on the spreadsheet.  I was still needing to chase the students up to fill it in.  I used it for 4 weeks before giving up!

Reading Practice Intensive - Day 5

 

Day 5 - Planning a Reading Programme

Due to our cluster Teacher Only Day this Friday, today we joined the Tuesday cohort for our Day 5 session meaning that we don't miss our professional learning at the end of the week.  The Tuesday cohort were a lovely group of teachers and we were made to feel very welcome by facilitators Naomi, Kiri and Sharon.  Thank you team!

Like we do each session, we began by looking at how we have gone with our homework tasks.  Unfortunately since our Day 4 session I have had a week off work sick and then once back have taught for a total of 4 days due to release for other commitments.  I have had a coaching conversation and I have been using some AI generated texts for my less able readers related to our hub Inquiry theme, and this has been going really well.

What did I learn that increased my understanding of the kaupapa and pedagogy of the Manaiakalani Reading Programme?

In Dorothy's absence we had a session with Fiona Grant today around sites - one of my favourite things!  I wondered how long I have been using Google Sites - after a quick investigation I found our site from 2016, and man, we have come a long way since then!  I think these students will be 16-17 years old now - goodness me!

It was good to be reminded that our site should reflect the Manaiakalani Programme priority goals:

• Engagement
• Personalised Learning
• Accelerated achievement
• Empowerment

I am confident that our hub learning site does tick all of these boxes.  I am proud that our Year 4 learners all have our learning site bookmarked and they picked up really early on in the year how to navigate their way around.  Recently when I was away sick for a week I was thrilled to watch a Year 4 group of readers showing their self management skills and getting stuck into their learning without me there.  If we can achieve this with more of our learners this frees the teacher up to actually get on with the act of teaching.

I am a little disappointed that our current cohort of students don't access any of their learning from home and I couldn't confidently even say that any of our parents have even looked at our learning site.  This is quite different from our Covid lockdown learners from 2020, and this is something I want to promote more throughout our hub.

What did I learn that could improve my capability and confidence in teaching reading?

Today has made me think more about a few tweaks we could make within our hub, for example, having the same students for both Reading and Writing, and using mixed ability groups.  I really enjoyed the two sessions Naomi led today about "Read like a writer - Write like a reader."  I cannot wait to see what my students produce using the template that we used today using sensory imagery to create suspense.

We have recently looked at how many minutes a day we teach Reading and Writing so when we looked at timetabling it was good to compare with the suggested 90 minutes a day, 4-5 days a week for Literacy, and 45-50 minutes, 4-5 days a week for Reading.  Our hub coverage is Reading 86 minutes daily and Writing 69 minutes daily.  In Years 3-4 the ideal is three groups per teacher per day, 20 mins each group session - this is what we aim for, with one group working independently each day.  At Reading time teachers should be:

• Teaching groups
• Conferencing with students
• Roving around the space
• Tracking/monitoring learning (digitally via Google Classroom/Hapara, with Mahi Trackers or otherwise)
• Observation notes while working with students (e.g. Guided Reading; formative)

Something to think about: Do I give my students enough choice for their Can Do activities? Am I making their learning less fun by taking this choice away?

What did I learn that could be used with my learners? 

I loved all the examples of Hand It in tracking spreadsheets, with percentage bars and emojis appearing when tasks are completed but I need to keep in mind if this would work bridging the gap between Year 3s on iPads and Year 4s on Chromebooks.  I hope to try one out with my Year 4 group.  I am also keen to work out how I can lock the spreadsheet so that each student can only edit their line on it, and also work out how to hide tabs from students.

I am excited to trial both ReadWorks and Literacy Planet in my Reading programme.  I already have my students use Epic but haven't yet set texts for them to read or used the quiz function this year.  

The session about Reading apps was thought provoking - are the apps engaging, do they cost money, is it too much screen time, and is the app fit for purpose? The "why" is more important than the "what" when it comes to Reading apps.  In a digital world it is also important that we don't forget about the non-digital activities: word work, paired reading/listening, wide reading, and writing/creating.

Very soon our Year 4s will begin blogging and I am excited to add this into my Reading programme for those learners.

What did I learn that could be shared within my wider community, with either colleagues, or whānau/aiga? 

• New Reading Apps that I learnt about today
• Inference Matrix from our Skill Builder session
• Narrative Beginnings (and Endings) Mentor Texts posters that each break out group created