Celebrating Academic Shift

 This year has been the first in a while with consistent time at school for some children. This has made the opportunity of accelerated shift. 

As part of my Class Onair Application for 2023 I have been reflecting on my academic achievement data from term 1 to end of term 2 for maths and writing and from term 1- term 3 in reading. 

As a teacher I have done a number of inquires into reading in the past and feel quite confident teaching reading. I have found that I can make accelerated shift for a number of children in my literacy class. 

Across the class there is only one learner who has not made 1 year or more of shift in the last 3 terms. 

However maths and writing a yet to show the same shift after two terms. 

I know that for writing and maths I need to keep working on my own practice and developing new strategies for supporting and growing learners knowledge in maths and writing. 

I am interested to see if this shift changes at the end of the year as terms 3 and hopeful term 4 are more stable in attendance than terms 1 and 2 were with isolating children and families. 

  

Creativity, Collaboration and Music

A huge part of my inquiry this year has shifted away from the elements of mathematics to the elements of collaboration and creativity. 

My hope is that by providing these activities for collaboration and creativity the children will be able to apply this learning across the curriculum. 

This lesson focused on building these skills and it was incredibly positive the way in which my class engaged with each others. 

Through this activity the children worked on expressing the values of our class as they see them in a song. 

See Class Onair lesson 

 

Creating, Collaborating and Coding

Mathematic can often be seen as a right or wrong type subject. Well there are many ways to solve problems the goal is the find and answer. This often makes it hard to get excited or collaborated. 

One things we have done this year to try and build this collaboration was finding ways to integrate. This lesson was a good example of this. Feel free to check it out. 

See Class Onair Lesson 

 

Level 3- Here we go again

The speed at which we returned to level 3 and staying at home this time was much faster than last time. 

We learned in the evening and the very next day by lunch time we were at Level 3 and standing up our Online learning platform again. 

I know for me I learned a lot from the first lockdown and this made it much easier to transition back into online learning. 

We also still had our online learning page set up and were ready to go with a template for what the learning design should look like. 

So what was different this time. We started out with very low attendance on our Google Meets with many children perhaps choosing to take a break or unable to access devices as we had a limit time to get them out to children. 

As we moved into the first full week attendance increased and by the second week I had 50% of my class attending Google Meets or blogging. 

As a result of this I felt it was important to offer more learning opportunities. This lead to Workshops which I ran in addition to our class Google Meets. These focused on one of the learning areas and expanded on the ideas covered in the Google Slide and rewindable teacher video. 

You can see one of these in this Class Onair lesson. 

One thing I found interesting is the confidence we all have gain through this experience to speak up and share in an online forum such as Google Meet. Reflecting on this I though what a life skill this is for the learners who have been engaging. 

I am still very concerned for learners who I have not seen engaging in online learning but am comforted by the fact that I have had contact with most families over the phone and they discussed options for their child and their learning if they can not get online. 

While this time is challenging and I know both I and my class would rather be at school learning together, I have seen great value in this time. I have learned to structure my lessons differently to include the value of playing games. I have begun to think more about how I can bring Google Meets back into the classroom so that all learners gain the value of learning to engage in this way. I have seen how conversation and breaking down of task can change the way a child looks at challenge problems. 

I am a learner! and this lockdown has taught me a lot.

Class Onair - Maths During Lockdown

I hope you will check out my latest Manaiakalani Class Onair episode. In this lesson you will see how we are planning for and providing support and feedback in maths during the lockdown. The learning focus on understanding place value addition. This episode is very special because it was filmed with one of my co-teachers Sharisse Scanlan. I want to thank her for joining me in this episode and for openly sharing the content she created.

Class Onair - Reading During Lockdown

I encourage you to check out my Manaiakalani Class Onair lesson. In this lesson you will see how I am planning for and providing support and feedback in reading during the lockdown. The learning focus is on careful reading and creation based on the texts that they have read. Texts were carefully selected so that all learning levels were focused on the same topic. 

Holiday Learning

Today is the first day of term 2 for 2020, but I am not at school and nor are the children in my class. We are all self-isolating in our homes. Staying in our bubbles to protect our communities from Covid19.

Over the last two weeks we have had the easter holidays. But the year 3 children at their teachers didn't want to stop learning. So we embarked on our Holiday Learning Journey.

This video was on our class site of Friday the 27th March the last day of term 1.

To learn more about our holiday learning journey check out this Class Onair Episode. 



I loved the learning shared during the holidays. Here are some great examples:

Toran 

My Dad drew these pictures of me playing "GOTCHA"

To stop the virus there is this game named "gotcha" 

How to play gotcha

If you see someone in your family touching their face you say "gotcha" then they have to stop touching their face and try to not touch their face with their hands. There are two winners who get a prize. One person who has not been touching their face wins. One person who has caught lots of people wins. Our prize was lollies! 

Sa

Today was a fun day. We made lots of cookies, and they were yummy with lots of sugar. We made cookie dough and put it in the oven. We made icing and the color was pink, green, and dark green. My siblings and I all got to put icing on the cookie and it was so yummy. We all ate our cookies outside and play games. 

Eve

Hello Everyone my Name is Eve. This is how you wash your hands to keep germs off them. 

Thank you for Watching!

Online Teaching during Covid-19 Lockdown

I talked in my last post about the process I went through to get to the formate we have ended up during for our online learning during the Covid-19 lockdown.

In this blog post I want to share in more detail what we decided to do and why.

So as discussed in this blog post we have used published to the Web Google Slides as the base for our learning at home page. We decided to limit the links by having one page and one Slide deck that all learning was on. In doing this it meant children could easily find Everything they needed in one place. 

We have had feedback from parents that this has been useful, as "it made it easy for kids to follow with little support from them." 

This video is just a look at what our learning for home page looks like. For may detail please go to my Class Onair Episode on this topic. 

Class Onair: Making Skittles

This is my most recent Class Onair Lesson.

This is a reading lesson with year 4 children reading at blue (level 11). The focus is on understand the purpose of a text and thinking about the decoding strategies they are using. Our learning intentions were:

• We are learning to re-read and read on to fix our mistakes. 
• We are learning to identify and discuss the main idea in a nonfiction text.  

To see the lesson click here

Reflection:

This group are amazing. They have a level of excitement, engagement and a positive attitude towards learning that not all groups have. I am also very lucky to know this group really well. They were all in my class last year, so I am aware of the strength they bring and the challenges they face. This group have been going great this year. They are behind where I would like them to be but they are constantly making progress which I am very happy about. This book was a little easy for them and did not provide enough challenge to tackle our decoding learning as I would have liked. However it did provide a great context to create and an opportunity to look at a style of text they were less familiar with. They have now moved up a reading level. 

Manaiakalani Class Onair

This year I am continuing my role as a Manaiakalani Class Onair teacher. I am excited to keep sharing the learning that takes place in my classroom and extend on my won learning through watching myself teach on video and hearing feedback from teachers. 




This video shares a bit more about what you will see on my Manaiakalani Class Onair page.

There are many amazing teachers taking part in Manaiakalani Class Onair this year and many teacher who have contributed in the passed. You will find episodes ranging from year 1 to year 13 in many curriculum areas.

Here is a link to the site. I hope you will visit.