Kia ora and welcome to my professional blog!
My name is Clarelle Carruthers. I am a 3/4 teacher at Pt England school in Tamaki, Auckland. Thank you for following my journey.
As it comes to the middle of term 2 I have been thinking about what data I have collected on my inquiry group and how this might be repeated at the end of the year to provide a rich profile of change in student learning.
Through taking this measure I have come to understand the issue and hope that through changed practice that I will see improvement and change across all measure at the end of the year.
I have already repeated some measures including running records and will be sharing what I have seen in student shift in the coming weeks.
T-Shaped literacy is something I have been familiar with for some time. Rereading the article made me reflect on how I could and should be using this idea better.
The key thing were:
Wide reading is essential to vocabulary acquisition.
A quote that really spoke to me from this research was "We also hypothesised that a condition for acceleration of students of any ages is the opportunity to “do harder stuff sooner” in their schooling."
I found it interesting that this research found that "our observation data did suggest that much classroom talk focused more on the strategies that students used for reading, than on the ideas that emerged from those texts"
What does this mean for me.
I have been trying to connect texts at every level through a share idea and bringing this discuss to the class.
I believe even more mileage and diversity of texts may be needed to extend my learners.
Today we have the please of hearing the amazing Rebecca Jesson.
We have been working around T-Shaped literacy for a while we have not seem this implement as well with junior learners.
Wide reading
Is the notion that to learn about the world, to learn to read you need to learn widely. The benefits of wide reading go beyond school. If you think about the number of words you can say you learned them by talking and reading. There are many words we never say orally that we can read because we have read them in context.
You get better at reading by doing it more!
We want children to be so engaged in reading that they want to read more.
Wide reading looks like 5+ a day books. Just like eating vegetables for keeping our bodies and brains healthy we need to read 5+ to extend our brains and learn more words.
But that is not enough.
We want to do deep reading as well unpacking the key ideas and engage with texts critically.
T-Shape literacy encourages us to use text sets that build ideas together. This allows learners to build understand over time.
There are lots of different ways to think about texts sets.
So why?
-Build vocabulary
-Maintain decoding
-Build local inference
When we as adults engage with a new concept we engage with multiple texts to draw conclusion. Research suggest that if you know something about it (have prior knowledge) it is easy to read about it.
When we use multiple texts:
-Main text
-Simpler texts
-Complementary texts
-Challenge texts
So what does this look like at a junior level?
What is the big idea in the books. This can be found by looking at what the character learners and how they change during the story.
Working together.
What is the relationship between the main character and the side kicks.
Likeable and unlikeable characters.
By really thinking about this with learners from the moment they start school we are creating readers who are connected with ideas that they will engage with as readers for the rest of the life.
So when planning we must ask. What does this set of texts teach us. We are pulling the texts that are a bit different from a them. This leads to a provocation, this is a question or statement that can be engaged with on both side.
Rebecca used a set of images to start the learning and provocation. Have some questions that we can ask for each book, then a big question that can get use connecting across texts. When coming up with this go back to the curriculum and think what is the area that connects best with the theme in the text. Prior knowledge should also be at the level of theme. Bring children to the new texts with some prior thinking.
Creating a modelling book at builds around the theme.
