Whew what a long term. Term 1 is always the hardest for me because you are setting up routines, getting to know the kids and they are getting to know you, testing and on top of it all teaching.
I have an adorable class of kids, well I say that every year...hee hee... who are really trying hard in all curriculum areas. Writing is definitely the area where they struggle the most. The templates I set up have worked on most of the kids but not all.
This is what has helped. Having clear voice instructions inserted into each slide explaining what is required of them. A step by step plan for writing a narrative in the correct order. I also had the same format each week so the kids were not getting something new on their i-pads each week.
Each week the students wrote 1 quality piece of writing. The first day small groups would sit with me and we would go over their plan and discuss characters and settings and 1 problem or event that might occur. I helped them get this up on their plan. As the term went on i helped less and less pulling away a little each week and allowing them the time to make their own mistakes and go back and change things around.
The best thing for me was watching their confidence grow and the way they would stand up and want to share their story. I had the whole class trying to bump each other off the apple tv to show off their work. Beautiful.
So over the next week I am going to reinvent the wheel and come up with something new and exciting for them to tackle in Term 2. Once these are completed I shall post them up. Overall great term, good progress was made by most and looking forward to Term 2.
Thursday, 21 April 2016
Sunday, 6 March 2016
Writing for my Wizards and Warriors
Hi welcome to 2016. After looking at all the data for my new class I have noticed there is a weakness in writing. So this year, well for the first half of the year, my focus is going to be how I can get my students excited about writing. To do this I am going to have to provide for them visually creative EE's to support them through the process. I have two main groups in my class.
The first group (The Wizards) are able to write simple sentences using their yellow and blue butterfly cards, with some exciting gifted topic words. But they still need prompting to use the basics, like capital letters and full stops.
My second group of students (The Warriors) are still not using finger spaces between their words and are unable to independently write a simple sentence. These are my priority learners. These students are all reading between level 3 and 8 in PM readers.
So for the last 5 weeks we have been religiously learning the words on the yellow butterfly card. I have made this into a game and it has worked really well. So the next step was to create some EE's using the words off the yellow butterfly card and some high frequency words out of their PM readers, to create very simple sentences. The students have to arrange the words including the full stop on their i-pad and then write them in their book.
The next step was to repeat the process but instead of writing the word that accompanies the picture (dog) the students have to use their letter knowledge and try to sound out what letter the word might start with. (h for house, c for car, t for train) With these EE's I also added a voice recording using garage band, allowing the students to go back and listen to the instructions again if they needed. Once they had arranged the words on their i-pad to form a complete sentence they wrote them in their book.
The first thing I noticed straight away was the level of independence these students showed they had. I could tell they felt more confident as they were engaged and happily doing their writing because they could. They were not sitting there feeling stink...:) Having to create finger spaces on their i-pads meant they had to write with finger spaces. Two of my students struggled with this at first and they are still struggling but they are writing......yay.
I have a lot of work ahead of me but I am thrilled so far with the results. I am not going to push them and get frantic and worry they are not making progress.........because they are. Right now my main goal is to build up their confidence...it's all about "woohooooo, you wrote amazing sentences all on your own". It's all about scaffolding them in the right way.
The first group (The Wizards) are able to write simple sentences using their yellow and blue butterfly cards, with some exciting gifted topic words. But they still need prompting to use the basics, like capital letters and full stops.
My second group of students (The Warriors) are still not using finger spaces between their words and are unable to independently write a simple sentence. These are my priority learners. These students are all reading between level 3 and 8 in PM readers.
So for the last 5 weeks we have been religiously learning the words on the yellow butterfly card. I have made this into a game and it has worked really well. So the next step was to create some EE's using the words off the yellow butterfly card and some high frequency words out of their PM readers, to create very simple sentences. The students have to arrange the words including the full stop on their i-pad and then write them in their book.
The next step was to repeat the process but instead of writing the word that accompanies the picture (dog) the students have to use their letter knowledge and try to sound out what letter the word might start with. (h for house, c for car, t for train) With these EE's I also added a voice recording using garage band, allowing the students to go back and listen to the instructions again if they needed. Once they had arranged the words on their i-pad to form a complete sentence they wrote them in their book.
I have a lot of work ahead of me but I am thrilled so far with the results. I am not going to push them and get frantic and worry they are not making progress.........because they are. Right now my main goal is to build up their confidence...it's all about "woohooooo, you wrote amazing sentences all on your own". It's all about scaffolding them in the right way.
Sunday, 20 December 2015
Friday, 11 September 2015
New Writing Templates
So its nearly the end of term and my idea to make templates has been an interesting exercise. I am lucky to work in a team where we all share our work. Because of this I realised there were already some great Reading templates made up, so I went in and fine tuned them for the learners in my class. So I decided to think about designing some writing templates, to make it easier for my learners to have a plan.
I have always been big on making a plan for writing and up until now the students have done this on a piece of paper. This has not always been successful. My students love working on their i-pads so I wanted to generate an exciting new plan with cool visuals to inspire them to write amazing stories.
I started with a narrative plan as my learners have always liked creating their own stories around fantasy and make-believe. The first attempt worked well but I knew I could make the plans better.
I knew I would need to generate 2 plans as I have 2 writing groups within my class. One plan would need a more formal structure and one would need voice instructions and a simple format to get them started.
Next we had a class discussion on what we would like to write about. The girls and boys had different opinions....of course. So we decided on the setting. Castles. That way the boys could write about knights and dragons and the girls could write about princesses and witches etc.
The first slide of their plan was to draw their character or characters. I placed some visuals around the outside of the slide to give them some inspiration.
After drawing their character they had to write some key words describing their character.
As a class we all googled castles and each student was allowed to chose the castle of their choice and insert this image into their slide.
They then had to write some key words describing their castle.
Once again I inserted some images around the outside of their plan to give them some ideas. These images were deleted once their own image was uploaded.
All good narratives have a problem or event that occurs. The students then had to sit down and come up with such an event and how they were going to solve this. This was probably the trickiest part and needed lots of scaffolding. I encouraged them to keep it simple and in the context of their setting.
This slide was to guide them through the process of writing a narrative. We wrote a story together first and I modelled what I wanted from them.
Many of my students even my top writers start each sentence with 'and then' so I wanted to provide them some different sentence starters. They did not have to use these but I found that most did.
So did it work? I can say with a huge smile on my face that I was over joyed with the results. Spending time going through the process of writing a narrative and giving the students some freedom to create their own character, and chose their own setting got them excited to tell a story. I noticed a real change in their attitude to writing. For once there was an eerie silence that fell over my class when it came to writing their stories into their writing books. Below is a story from one of my top writers in the class.
The next step was to create a writing plan with voice instructions for my students who do struggle with writing. They all have fabulous ideas but getting them down on paper is a struggle.
The first and second slide were just the same for 'character' and 'setting' but using garage band I inserted a voice over explaining what they had to do. The third slide was to come up with one event.
The voice instructions for this slide tell the students to think of something exciting that could happen to their character. Once again this was where I was needed to help them get their thoughts down. I encouraged them to go away and record what they wanted to happen and then we sat and wrote it down as simply as possible.
This is the simple writing plan for my second group. Their goal was to write 3 great sentences using the gifted words we had written down together. Each voice instruction tells them what is required in each sentence.
Once again I was blown away with the results. Garageband has been my life saver. Having the ability to record my instructions has given my students who struggle to work independently, the freedom to know exactly what they should be doing. Each student in my class has a set of head phones so there is no problem with hearing my voice booming over the classroom. These students are generally the ones who need my constant supervision to stay on task. Once again I could hear a pin drop when it came to writing their stories. Below is a piece of writing from a student who has struggled with writing all year.
While I was watching this boy write I could see how confident he was. He knew what he had to do. I saw him flicking through his slides and listening intently to the voice instructions. This boy usually takes a week to write 2-3 sentences but he wrote this in an hour. Once he had written up his story and I had checked spelling etc, he was free to blog his story and I have never seen him look so proud of his work.
Of course there are still things I could do better and I will continue to tweak my templates so they work even better for my learners. The idea is to scaffold less and less with each group. We will continue to have fun with narratives until the end of term and then I am going to concentrate on writing Recounts in term 4. So my next goal is to create a recount template over the holidays.
I have always been big on making a plan for writing and up until now the students have done this on a piece of paper. This has not always been successful. My students love working on their i-pads so I wanted to generate an exciting new plan with cool visuals to inspire them to write amazing stories.
I started with a narrative plan as my learners have always liked creating their own stories around fantasy and make-believe. The first attempt worked well but I knew I could make the plans better.
I knew I would need to generate 2 plans as I have 2 writing groups within my class. One plan would need a more formal structure and one would need voice instructions and a simple format to get them started.
Next we had a class discussion on what we would like to write about. The girls and boys had different opinions....of course. So we decided on the setting. Castles. That way the boys could write about knights and dragons and the girls could write about princesses and witches etc.
The first slide of their plan was to draw their character or characters. I placed some visuals around the outside of the slide to give them some inspiration.
After drawing their character they had to write some key words describing their character.
As a class we all googled castles and each student was allowed to chose the castle of their choice and insert this image into their slide.
They then had to write some key words describing their castle.
Once again I inserted some images around the outside of their plan to give them some ideas. These images were deleted once their own image was uploaded.
All good narratives have a problem or event that occurs. The students then had to sit down and come up with such an event and how they were going to solve this. This was probably the trickiest part and needed lots of scaffolding. I encouraged them to keep it simple and in the context of their setting.
This slide was to guide them through the process of writing a narrative. We wrote a story together first and I modelled what I wanted from them.
Many of my students even my top writers start each sentence with 'and then' so I wanted to provide them some different sentence starters. They did not have to use these but I found that most did.
So did it work? I can say with a huge smile on my face that I was over joyed with the results. Spending time going through the process of writing a narrative and giving the students some freedom to create their own character, and chose their own setting got them excited to tell a story. I noticed a real change in their attitude to writing. For once there was an eerie silence that fell over my class when it came to writing their stories into their writing books. Below is a story from one of my top writers in the class.
The first and second slide were just the same for 'character' and 'setting' but using garage band I inserted a voice over explaining what they had to do. The third slide was to come up with one event.
The voice instructions for this slide tell the students to think of something exciting that could happen to their character. Once again this was where I was needed to help them get their thoughts down. I encouraged them to go away and record what they wanted to happen and then we sat and wrote it down as simply as possible.
This is the simple writing plan for my second group. Their goal was to write 3 great sentences using the gifted words we had written down together. Each voice instruction tells them what is required in each sentence.
Once again I was blown away with the results. Garageband has been my life saver. Having the ability to record my instructions has given my students who struggle to work independently, the freedom to know exactly what they should be doing. Each student in my class has a set of head phones so there is no problem with hearing my voice booming over the classroom. These students are generally the ones who need my constant supervision to stay on task. Once again I could hear a pin drop when it came to writing their stories. Below is a piece of writing from a student who has struggled with writing all year.
Of course there are still things I could do better and I will continue to tweak my templates so they work even better for my learners. The idea is to scaffold less and less with each group. We will continue to have fun with narratives until the end of term and then I am going to concentrate on writing Recounts in term 4. So my next goal is to create a recount template over the holidays.
Sunday, 9 August 2015
Term 3 Plan
Term 3 is upon us and the learners I was targeting last term have responded well to my Explain Everything (EE) activities. By recording the instructions, I made the students independent learners and this helped everybody in class get on with their work and not interrupt each other.
This term I am going to focus on creating some EE templates that can be used for any book at varying levels. Although I have got quicker at making EE's it is still time consuming and I need to work smarter not harder.
At Point England School we work to a model of Learn-Create-Share so it's important for my students to get creative and make their own EE's. This has been successful in Math lessons and writing lessons and now through creating basic templates I hope to get the students input in creating our own EE reading activities.
I created a very simple book review template for my students who are reading above the standard.
Slide 1 - students have to take a photo of the cover of the book and insert it into slide.
Slide 2 - students have to write down the name of the Author and the Title of the book.
Slide 3 - students have to tell me about the story adding as much detail as they can.
Slide 4 - students write the main characters down and briefly tell me about each one.
Slide 5 - students tell me why they like/dislike the story. They can do this using the record button.
This has worked ok but I need to fine tune it. I also need to create templates for my learners who are reading below the standard. I will have to put in voice instructions for them but I hope to make it general enough that we can put the template to any book.
This term I am going to focus on creating some EE templates that can be used for any book at varying levels. Although I have got quicker at making EE's it is still time consuming and I need to work smarter not harder.
At Point England School we work to a model of Learn-Create-Share so it's important for my students to get creative and make their own EE's. This has been successful in Math lessons and writing lessons and now through creating basic templates I hope to get the students input in creating our own EE reading activities.
I created a very simple book review template for my students who are reading above the standard.
Slide 1 - students have to take a photo of the cover of the book and insert it into slide.
Slide 2 - students have to write down the name of the Author and the Title of the book.
Slide 3 - students have to tell me about the story adding as much detail as they can.
Slide 4 - students write the main characters down and briefly tell me about each one.
Slide 5 - students tell me why they like/dislike the story. They can do this using the record button.
This has worked ok but I need to fine tune it. I also need to create templates for my learners who are reading below the standard. I will have to put in voice instructions for them but I hope to make it general enough that we can put the template to any book.
Saturday, 2 May 2015
Creating New Activities
My next step was to create high cognitive activities that was going to engage my lower level learners. I began with a reading group. These students are reading at Level 3 so they are well below the National Standard for Year 2.
I first sat down and discussed with this group what sort of activities they enjoyed doing on Explain Everything. Everyone of them said they enjoyed recording themselves. So I set about photographing each page of a book. I then typed up the text for each page and scrambled the words and punctuation around. I wanted them to form a complete sentence and then record themselves reading the sentence.
Next I created some pages for work on some of the high frequency words to consolidate their learning and I finished the activity with a picture.
Problem: They could not read my instructions, even though I had typed the instructions in the simplest of language. So I went back in and I recorded all instructions using garage band and inserted them into Explain Everything.
This worked well. The students really enjoyed the activity and the best thing of all I was not interrupted when I was reading with another group because they could follow my verbal instructions. It does take time to create these activities but I know I will get quicker as I continue.
I first sat down and discussed with this group what sort of activities they enjoyed doing on Explain Everything. Everyone of them said they enjoyed recording themselves. So I set about photographing each page of a book. I then typed up the text for each page and scrambled the words and punctuation around. I wanted them to form a complete sentence and then record themselves reading the sentence.
Next I created some pages for work on some of the high frequency words to consolidate their learning and I finished the activity with a picture.
Problem: They could not read my instructions, even though I had typed the instructions in the simplest of language. So I went back in and I recorded all instructions using garage band and inserted them into Explain Everything.
This worked well. The students really enjoyed the activity and the best thing of all I was not interrupted when I was reading with another group because they could follow my verbal instructions. It does take time to create these activities but I know I will get quicker as I continue.
Sunday, 1 March 2015
Focus for Inquiry has changed!
After thinking long and hard about my inquiry and looking at the make-up of my class I have decided to change the focus for my inquiry to the students who need more support in class. These students can sometimes struggle to stay on task and stay focussed on any given activity. So my goal for them is to create high cognitive engagement activities that they can tackle on their own and help them become more independent learners.
I will have to look at wording these activities clearly in language they understand or providing them with appropriate images that will allow them to work through the process, communicating with each other to problem solve and encouraging them to work in small groups sharing their ideas and helping each other through the given activity.
By scaffolding these groups correctly each individual will have the chance to shine and use their own strengths to help the group.
I will have to look at wording these activities clearly in language they understand or providing them with appropriate images that will allow them to work through the process, communicating with each other to problem solve and encouraging them to work in small groups sharing their ideas and helping each other through the given activity.
By scaffolding these groups correctly each individual will have the chance to shine and use their own strengths to help the group.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)