This is an exciting year for me as a teacher. I will be running a 1:1 i-pad class for year 2 and we are working on Explain Everything for the majority of our lessons. My question asks, "how would you begin to get higher order thought out of learners who are well above the National Standard in Reading".
I want to go beyond the menial tasks of word families, basic comprehension, spelling etc. These students need to stretch themselves into the realm of connecting and comparing the information and ideas from the text to their own experience to form an opinion. I want to allow for them to predict using evidence in the text to support their predictions, or make an inference when there is none. When analysing I want to help them identify and explain the writers purpose using evidence from the text. Finally they need to be able to apply self monitoring where they can use a variety of strategies when they lose meaning such as: rereading, reading on, or slowing down their reading pace, searching for clues in the text, making a prediction, making connections to what they know, imagining what they are reading, asking themselves questions to clarify their understanding. So......interesting times ahead. I will be creating many different lessons on Explain Everything of varying formats and conducting interviews with students to get feed back on what they find interesting and challenging and maybe even boring! I will be posting my findings as my research unfolds so stay tuned.....
