Term 1 Reader Profile Survey

This week I analysed the results of a reading survey on my Year 3 and Year 4 learners.  

The first key observation was the reading skills actually involved in completing the survey - many students needed assistance with reading the questions or needed an adult to ask them (interview style) the questions one-to-one.  I know I was ambitious trying to capture the viewpoint of my whole hub but I only ended up getting 55 out of 76 to do it. (And I'm not even going to mention the nightmare of discovering that when the students tried to do it on iPads they ended up editing someone else's as they were doing it at the same time!)

Students in my hub are a mixture of Year 4 students that were in my Year 3/4 hub last year, and Year 3 and Year 4 students who have moved up from the Year 2/3 hub.  I knew that they had different experiences with how Reading is delivered and taught at school.  I was surprised that 35% of students didn't like Reading at school.  I think this is a bit sad, and wonder what we as teachers can do to change their perceptions.

I was pleased to see that 71% of students are currently reading a book for enjoyment.  I did assume this may be higher -we regularly visit the school library regularly and have lots of opportunities where students silent read.  Do I assume the others just have a chapter book in their crate that they don't read or that they are not enjoying reading the book they currently have out from the library?

I was also pleased that 80% of students think that reading can make them smarter and help them to relax.  

I was a bit shocked in the number of students that had a card for the public library.  The Hornby public library is literally within our school zone and less than a 10 minute walk from our school.  During Covid times the "library bus" came to visit us (although a bit irregularly) and we got a lot of our students signed up with library cards at the time.  This cohort of students would possibly have not quite started school.  It is a real shame that such a free, community resource is not valued and utilised more by our families.  Does this also reflect on our student's parents as readers themselves?

The variety of types of books students enjoy reading was pretty much as I thought, and reflects perhaps what teachers read to their classes for our "Feed & Read" each day.  Common answers - chapter books, funny books, scary books and picture books.

Further results if you are interested are here:

So now what?

I am looking forward to diving deeper into what I can do as a teacher to change these survey results for the positive.  I have some ideas already (promote silent reading, book selling popular authors to really hook these kids into wanting to read certain titles, exploring the library to capture the interest in books other than chapter books or picture books).  I am more exciting to get into this professional learning and be able to share it with my wider team.

Session Four: Dealing with Data

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

Dorothy told us all about the SHARE component of Learn Create Share.  We are born to share, it's an instinct or compulsion.  We share - food, fishing stories, successes, failures, wins, joys, loss, tears, ideas, friends, achievements, vision, goals...

The invention of social media in 2005 allowed sharing and communication to become more accessible.  Things went viral - Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, YouTube, etc.

This was a great quote from Dorothy:

There is a magnetic attraction for our children to have an audience to share and this was then able to be used in education.  Before sharing had been constrained by time, place, people, etc.  Pre 2005 our audience was one another, the class, the school, and the local community.  Sharing in the digital age adds the ability to share globally.

Pre 2005 the audience was a compulsory audience.  After social media the audience became authentic - this is how we can share as connected learners.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional? 

A great Hapara hot tip from Gerhard on dragging a child to the top of the list so you can find them easily and monitor them.  In my team we use the group function to organise our 79 students.

The session on MyMaps was great - I can see it will be really helpful for things like measuring our cross country course around our grounds.  It would also be good to use at the start of the year as part of our Pepeha - where are you from unit.

Just this week I have learnt how to freeze columns and rows on spreadsheets, which has been awesome.  I have taught myself most of my spreadsheet skills so to learn some short cuts is helpful.  We use spreadsheets a lot as we use them for our planning templates, keeping track of our school wide PB4L reward tickets, and obviously assessment data.  Lots of useful hints and tips learnt with Gerhard - protecting sheets, getting the sparklines, cropping sheets, inserting check boxes, splitting names, and using a task tracker.  I love the idea of using a task tracker to track student blog posts or comments made on others blogs where they insert the hyperlink to the post or comment that they made.  I also will try the pixel art using spreadsheets to create art - the kids will love it, especially my gaming boys!

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

I have been using Google Forms in my programme during the Covid lockdown with a poem and comprehension activity.  Venessa has now shown me how to add the answer key and assign points for correct answers.  This will be a great time saver as previously I had to do that on the spreadsheet each time a child submitted their answers.  This one of the activities the students asked if they could continue to do now that we are back at school.

Here is the Google Form which I adapted today to make into a quiz with answer key and scoring.  Feel free to have a go at it!

Looking forward to trying the pixel art using Google spreadsheets to create art - the kids will love it, especially my gaming boys!

I love the notion of taking a screenshot of each student's blog overview stats for them to see.  This would be great at the moment after lockdown as the number of blog posts generally increased (for the majority of students.). Great ideas for how to do this and templates on these two links - a student and a teacher.  This would be great to do with our Year 6 students at the beginning of the school year as part of our Statistics Maths unit as they will have 2 full years of having their own blog and hopefully so good data on them.

I chose one of my Year 6 students and looked at their blog posts over the last 3 years.  Amazing to see the difference in lockdown.  This was a student who absolutely loved home learning, averaging 3 blog posts per day.




What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

I will use lots of the spreadsheet tips in my role as Club Secretary for the local rugby club - for our database and registrations.