Instructional reading Middle Levels

 

Looking at a modelled lesson by the wonderful Rebecca was great. 

She started with a great recap of what they covered last time and praised the skills they already have. We need to do a lesson on talking. 

Who is going to reply? You young people are going to reply to each other. 

Introduction: This is a nonfiction story, this is a text with information in it. do you know why authors write texts with information in it? 

It's not just about reading its about thinking about what we are reading. 

From watching the lesson we saw the value of the words "Add on..." 

How do we build their confidence and oral language skills to talk and engage in conversation through listening, sharing and adding to the discussion. 

We can use think, pair, share and get the children sharing the idea the buddy talked about. 

She is bring in a lot of vocabulary bring in the real and complexed words. We need to have high expectation around the vocabulary. 

Modelling, If I read something and don't find as many benefits, I read it again. 

 

Hapara Certified Champion

Becoming a Hapara Certified Champion has been a goal of mine for a while. In fact I started the course last year but sadly could not complete it due to other commitments. 

This time around I was determined to do my best and show what I know about Hapara while hopefully learning some new tips and tricks along the way. 

I found the course very good and learned a lot of cool tips and trick while reminding myself about the power of this platform for support student learning and increasing visibility for teaching and learning in the classroom. 

I found it interesting learning more about workspaces as these are something used more at often in Manaiakalani high schools. Create my own workspace was a lot of fun and made we think about elements I could be adding my own site design. 

I want to give a huge shoutout to the Hapara team especially Randy Fairfield for all his support and positive feedback during this course. I really think that is one of the things that sets this course apart from other free professional learning you have a mentor guiding you as you develop your skills and Randy was excellent reaching out with offers of help at every stage and letting me work at a pace that worked for me. 

This is not an advertisement for the course but rather a reflection on my learning but might I just say if you have not done this course and you use Hapara teacher dashboard, I so recommend it. 

It feels great to finally have taken the time to do this and to be able to proudly say "I am a Hapara Champion Educator!" 

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.

Create Staff Meeting

Today we have a cluster wide Manaiakalani Create Staff Meeting. I am lucky to be presenting with Angela Moala. We are sharing ideas for coding with Codey Rocky Robots.  

Getting Started with position and orientation

We have had so much fun over the past two days jumping into the site that we received from our student teachers.

We started by looking at prepositions through a Kahoot, Drag and Drop prepositions activity and movie making.

I have loved every minute of teaching this unit so far and the kids feel the same. Please check out this blog post to see what the kids had to say.

What we liked most was that every video the student teachers made connected so well to the learning task. They had a clear understanding of what the class need and made it fun and exciting.

Our first thoughts on the site:
 

Kahoot:

Prepositional language:

A gift for me and Room 21

This term I have had the wonderful privilege of working with Debbie, Karen, Aamel and  Lucy during their two week online practicum.

From the moment we first met on Google Meet I could tell they were a hard working bunch of ladies who were eager to learn all they could on their journey to becoming incredible teachers.

On Thursday the 25th of June at 2:35pm just after saying Good Afternoon to my outstanding year 3/4 class I open my emails and ran full of excitement to show my Co-Teacher what my student teacher had created.

In just two weeks they had clearly taken all we had talked about, looked closely at my class blog, the learners blogs and the curriculum and this had lead to a very special and exciting gift not only for myself but for the learners of Room 21.

This site aptly named Maths Fun, is a sequence of learning for the topic of position and orientation. From the moment I opened the first page I was filled with excitement for what the learning would look like in my classroom. Like I said to the training teachers "I am in love with what you have created!"

Here are the reasons why:

The home page has the cutest  introduction videos from each of them really letting the learners see who made this for them. 

The topic of the site is clearly introduced. 

They have used Kahoot, which they knew from discussion is engaging and exciting for my class. 

The topic is broken up into clear parts which would make up lessons or week long units. 

Topics:

Each topic is engaging with awesome activities such as battleship, find the Pokemon (using the children's own creations), Movie making with positions and a Quiz about directions in our very own school. It is clear to see real thought has been put into this. 

I want to once again thank these wonderful training teachers for their hard work. I can't wait to test out this amazing site with my class and I am sure they will love it as much as I do. 

I will share how it goes later this week. 

Online Student Teachers

Ever since my first day in the classroom I have waited eagerly for the day I would be able to have my own student teacher.

I guess this is because of all the amazing Associate teachers I had and the many mentors who have supported me since then. Looking back I know that each one of those people gave me a gift. From all I have gain curriculum, from some I learned patience from others I learned to have high expectations and from all I learned to be a teacher is so many other ways.

So when the opportunity arose to be an online Associate Teacher for the group of training teachers in the graduate program I literally jumped for joy. This was it, my chance to give back the gift so many wonderful teacher had given me. Little did I know that I would get a much greater gift from my student teacher than I could ever give them.

Before our first meeting I emailed the training teacher to set up a time and shared with them this video that the children in room 21 helped me to create to give the teachers a feel for our classroom.

This movie is movie is just for your Debbie, Karen. Aamel and  Lucy.

Only moments after I sent the email I had response and the lovely ladies had commented on our blog.


Only a few days later we met on Google Meet for the first time. Our meeting was a whirlwind of ideas, information and conversation.  I tried my best to collate all we talked about into a Google Doc so that they could refer back to it. I also gave them their task description, as these student teachers could not be with us in person they were asked to look through the kids blogs, comments and collaborate to create a set of learning activities to meet the students needs.

I asked for, During level 2 we look at position and orientation. This proved to be a challenge for the children. They struggled with the vocabulary of position: in front, behind, beside, under, over etc North, South, East, West and so on. They began using grid coordinates and needed more work on this. It would be great if they could have a learning experience using a range of positional language and working with grid coordinates. This will be with the learner in my class working at and above a year 3 level.

From this we discuss them each taking an area and creating a task for the learners. We talked about games as a way of engaging the children. We talked about the interests of the kids and how these can be motivating factors in learning.

During the two weeks the training teachers had to create their learning activities I had a range of questions from them. However these questions for the most part were content and learner focused and not digital skill focused like I had expected.

Reflecting back I remember 3 days before our second meeting feel concerned that I had not supported them enough when I heard other teachers talking about their training teachers asking for digital support.

What I learned was that if they had needed it they would have asked but they like any great team had been drawing on the resource of each other, the internet and the university and had save only the questions about my learners that no one else could answer for me.

The site they create is exceptional and therefore deserve a blog post all of its own. I feel so privileged to have had three amazing student teacher, who are self driven, hard working, thoughtful teachers  already. They have shown me they take children learning seriously and what to use all they know about a group of children to create content that inspire and challenges them.

Thank you so much Debbie, Karen. Aamel and  Lucy for inspiring me with your passion and commitment to children's learning. 

Learning from others

Practical advice for approaching online learning in primary schools Webinar hosted by The Education Hub featuring Kerry Oldman, Head of the Junior School and Victoria Mauala a Year 3 teacher from St Cuthbert’s College in Auckland. 

What has your over arching approach been during this time? 
Well-Being, this is a new time and we need to look after each other. Making sure everyone is working together and we have consistent messages. Only do what you can. 

Teacher have work in year group teams. They have turned into a year group of teachers working together not just a class. 

Team Work
How do you work as a team?
With the co-teacher the teacher Zoom together at 8am just the teachers checking in together and setting out the day. Being supportive by checking in. School team have been meeting at the end of every day or at least twice a week. Planning done well in advance so that things run as smoothly as possible. In a way it is like going back to being a beginning teacher, being over planned helps you to make things run smoothly. 

They blocked their day into four shorter blocks which they work to as a system. They then changed that for the younger children to just a morning and afternoon block. They tried to keep the normal school day.

This has been an opportunity to learn new things and think about what different thing you will bring back from this experience. 

After listening to these teachers share it was interesting to notice that a number of the key ideas such as choice. Providing tasks that can be independent and teachers still being part of the teaching and learning process were all similar to what we were doing. 

I will add the link to the video recording once it is up so you can see what this school is doing for yourself. 

Get involved

This term has started off very different from every other term I have ever taught. I started the term not cleaning my classroom, not organising reading book, not getting art supplies ready but at home creating fully digital content to engage learners in both digital and hands on learning.

During this lockdown one of the thing we have talk about a lot is staying active. We know that being active is important not just for our physical health but for our mental health also.

To help support us as teachers to keep our classes active our wonderful sports co-ordinator Sally Va'afusuaga put together a challenge for kids which they would get house points for completing.

This week the challenge was to spell our name doing exercises. Here is my example for the children.

Amazing Teachers

There are so many amazing teacher out there, doing amazing thing online. Yesterday I had the privilege of joining the Google Meet of Miss Ashley and her class of year 7/8 students.

They have been learning about different pandemics over time and were beginning to make comparisons between them.

If you click on the image below it will take you to Miss Ashley's class learning site and the section she has adapted for distance learning.



The lesson had 5 parts as can be seen on this document (click to see the full version)


Before jumping in they started with a revision. I really liked the way this was done. Miss Ashley had posted yesterdays learning on the class blog and the children then added comments of something they enjoyed learning from the day before.

I thought this was a great idea. It links together the Cybersmart learning with the recap of the learning from the day before.

After this they children read the story themselves and notes words that were new to them on their own vocabulary list. After this they read together stopping at words they might need support with and discussing these together. They talked about the double negative of 'it wasn't uncommon for children to help' They discussed the words, clergyman, mourners, constantly and burial, thinking about the root of each word and similar word they new and noted these down.

After this each children wrote their own short summary on the same document, during this time Miss Ashley provided writing feedback and comments on the document.

After this they moved onto creating a Venn Diagram about all the different pandemics they had learned about this far.

This was a very exciting lesson the children were engaged the whole time and excited to share. It was clear that Miss Ashley had long strong relationships with the children.

To see all the learning check out this post on Miss Ashley's Class Blog.

Thank You to Miss Ashley and Room 8. It was so cool to see how you have been learning during this lockdown.

Supporting the wellbeing of teachers, students and parents

This Webinar by Clinical Psychologist Dr Natalie Flynn focused on the Wellbeing of all during this Covid19 lockdown. 

She said that the stresses are different for every bubble. It seems that one big stress is the juggle between home-work balance. From a practical perspective teacher always making lists and look at the reality of these lists.

We must accept that we can only do what we can do. We have to look after our mental, physical and emotional health for both ourselves and our learners. We have to notice and accept when we are doubting ourselves and putting pressure on ourselves.

You have to be your own self advocate, if you can't, say you can't. Be honest with yourself and others.

We also have the responsibility in this time for supporting parents. Every parents is in a different place and parenting at the best of time is not easy. We as teachers have to be empathetic and understand that communicating during this time can be challenging.

What about student well being
Children are in a place of a lot of anxiety, the world is not normal for them. A large part of our role right now is supporting students emotionally and socially, checking in on children. We need to validate children feeling, "yes it is hard." Before trying to solve the problems.

Young children often talk about being scared or not being scared we need to support them with the emotional language to explain their feelings. (Worried, anxious, confused etc)

Children are struggling with the lack of social contact and social learning
The social aspect is very hard for everyone. For many children it is hard socially and we are lucky to have the the digital connection. It may be a time to relax the rules around social media and digital connection.

Treat yourself and all around you with kindness. 

We all need to start from the stand point that teachers love children and want to help children. Remember that parents love their children too. We all need to be compassionate with each other and ourselves. 

Knowing that this is time of struggled and time of difference we can't push ourselves to meet all our goals during this time. We need to be kind to ourselves and know that it is okay. 

We are create new norms for this time. We need to explain the reason why we need to keep apart. Talk about it as a mission. We are all safe but we need to protect others like our grandparents. 

We as schools, teachers and communities, need to talk about what is important right now. A place of safety, calm, keep everyones mental health in a good space. We should be looking first at mood before academic achievement. 

A focus on self-compassion an understand that we are not going to meet all our goals, no one is perfect and that is okay. 

We need to check in on learners. Can you reach out and ask, How are you feeling? How is the work, is it interesting for you? 

This talk made me think about some recent interaction I have had. Did I show self-compassion and how can I make sure I do this in the future. 

I will add the link to the video for this talk once it become available. Thank you to The Education Hub for providing this Webinar.  

Connecting-Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu

This term has meant some changes for the Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu program. While the focus remains on connecting children using blog commenting with schools across the country this term the wonderful Fiona Grant has add a professional learning element that connects us at teachers through a Google Meet.

These meeting have been incredible. They are an opportunity to see how teachers around the country are going with distance learning and share ideas and success stories.

Last week the meeting was run as a SLAM this meant that people had 1 minute to share and idea to help others with their blogging, class site or teacher workflow.

It was such great fun and we all learnt some great tips. You can check out the slide and recorded Google Meet here.

Distance Learning- Keeping a Routine

So what does it mean to translate a classroom routine into a Google Hangout Meet.

I think the biggest challenge I have found is that things can't happen at the same time as they normally would in a classroom.

That doesn't mean that the structures and process can't be the same when the do happen.

In my pervious post I talked about the structure for our Google Meets. What I didn't mention is the need for the focus to shift slightly to a place where children can share and feel connected.

We have used our meet of course as a place of learning but also as a place of interact. With the restriction of not be able to leave ones home much, interaction with those outside of our own families has significantly decreased.

We have to provide a space for that while keeping the focus on education.

Below is an edited video of one of our class meetings. You will see the main parts of our routine from Karakia and Mihi, through to sharing, instructions and literacy (shared book).

Digital Fluency Intensive at a Distance

This week on Thursday I had the wonderful opportunity to support teacher in creating a multimodal site as a coach for the digital fluency intensive.

First I connected with the awesome teachers from the West Coast of the South Island. It was inspiring to hear them discuss the leap they had made into distance learning with kids. It was also heart warming to hear their challenges and what they were doing to over come them.


Later in the day I worked with the wonderful Alisha and Helen. Both of these teachers jump straight into planning a site that they could actively use in the classroom or through distance learning with their children. They took the material I offered and added to it and each site had a different focus.

These ladies inspired me to make another site. To take what I have learned this far about good distance teaching and learning and incorporate that into a resource that I can use and share with others going forward.

Here is my site

It is not finished an I have number of videos I want to had. 

This day reminded me again of the passion of teacher and their drive to do all they can no matter the situation. So thank you to all the teachers out there making their classrooms accessible digitally and from a distance. A thank you Alisha and Helen, you are both an inspiration.

Motivation in Lockdown.

Tonight I attended a video talk by Harry Flether-Wood called "Supporting student motivation and engagement when learning from home."

Image from Pixabay. 

I choose to join this session to help me better understand others views on this learning from home digitally and to see how similar they are to what I am already doing. I also wanted to see if I could gain some insight into improvements I could make to my learning from home site.

Harry is a trained teacher who has taught at schools in Japan, India and the UK.

What does the research say:
The need to choose what is most important.
How do I form habits for my students?

• Help to keep the learning happening without teacher nagging. 
• Help students to plan study routine. 
• Children should be thinking about making a plan. 
• Social norms. 

What habits would be useful in distance learning?

• Keep it simple. 
• Turn up.

The more complicated we make a habit the easier it is to maintain. 

We need to help children pick a time for each thing they do. Help children get a detailed plan. Link habits to existing habits. I eat breakfast, then I do reading. 

There as been a lot of talk of schedule and structure. My program does not at this stage have a time table. You do reading from 9-10 etc. 

Suggested whole school and something closer to the kids. 

Motivate kids by the fear of missing out. Conversation could be more productive through chat maybe? Calling on kids in the hangout will help the conversation continue. 

Similar task will help keep things simple and allow for children to engage without as much teacher scaffolding. 

Think about what we want children to know when we get back to the classroom.  

So what?

I think the points raise around routine are valuable and something I will look at talking with the kids about. I don't think this is a one size fits all in terms of routine. Every does reading at 9am etc does not fit our current context. But I think we need to have more of a conversation on this topic as teachers and with the children and their families.

Thanks to The Education Hub for hosting this webinar. I will link to the video once it is up.

Hangout with the Block

Today was the first day that we had a Google Hangout/Meet with the children from rooms 21, 22, 23. I have to admit I was worried when we first discussed having a Google Hangout/Meet with year 3 children with limited device and who have never done this before. 

In order to make sure children had all the information they needed before they joined the hangout. 

I want to thank Danni Stone for helping me to make a video to show what it would be like to join the hangout and what would be expected. 

Our hangout today started with welcoming each child and checking they could turn off and on their microphones. 

Once they were all settled, we had 10 children join us today, we had our Karakia and Cayden lead our Mihi. 

After this each child had a chance to share something they had been doing during lockdown. This was lovely. I liked hearing all the story and how the children had been staying fit. 

After this we shared a bit about what today might look like. Screen sharing the site to help kids follow through what was expected. 

After this we opened up to question and finished with a story by Miss Scanlan. 

Thank you to all the children who were amazing. They all had plain backgrounds and used their mics well. 

How have your hangout experiences been? I would love to hear from others school digitally bout how they are connecting. 

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!

Looking back

"You will never forget your first class" 

This is a saying we as teachers hear all the time. Especially when you are starting out in your career, and I guess in some ways it is true. I have very fond memory of my first class. They were a year 4 class made up of 54 children and three teachers. They are now year 8s at our school and when I see them walking around I always think wow they have grown up so much. 

But this blog post is not about them, not really. This post is about how much I have grown as a teacher since my first weeks at Pt England School in 2016. It is not easy to forget your first class but it is easy to forget who you were as a teacher in your first year of teaching. 

In this respect I am one of the lucky ones because I had the wonderful Anne Sinclair Observe me throughout my journey to becoming the teacher I am today. I fully believe that she has had a massive impact on me as a teacher and I feel so privileged to have had her support. 

This morning I open the document from my first observation from 15th February 2016. Here are some of the comments:

"You have great models to draw from Clarelle and they are hard acts to follow, but as your confidence increases, you will be able to try different ways of presenting." 

"Working in a team is an art form and it should be evolving and changing as you progress. You will find as you progress, positions and situations/contexts will change and you will have a chance to lead, design, decide and contribute more, so that it truly becomes a co-share in the Hub."

As reflect bad I remember the shy young teacher, who copied others rather than stood on her own skills and passion, and I thank her. I needed to be that teacher to become the teacher I am today.

I think if I could list 5 things that I would do again or more of as a beginning teacher they would be:

• Always say "yes" take any opportunity to learn from experience.
• Speak up more, you only know if it's a good idea if you share it.
• Watch as many teacher as I could. You find tricks, tips and a style by seeing and drawing on the strengths of others.
• Make mistakes, no one is perfect, in making mistakes we learn. Teachers are learners too.
• Enjoy every moment. No two moments are the same in teaching so enjoy each moment and have fun. If you are having fun the kids will also.

So to all your teachers out there no matter is you are early in your career or have been teaching for much longer than me, think back. Who were/are you in your first year of teaching? How have you changed? Because it may be our first class we never forget but I hope you won't forget the teacher you were for them.

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. 

A Big Change: My thinking behind online teaching

If you had asked me in January if I could teach online I would have said "no" or maybe "I am not sure, I could try." But back then how could I have anticipated what this year would bring.

We as teachers face many challenges each day and as a result are constantly changing the way we teach, but it is not often a change this big happens, this fast.

As I looked back at what I did as a result of the sudden change in our society I wondered if my thinking would be of us to others.

This video shows the thought process I went through to get to the current asynchronous model of online teaching.



This will be the first of many blog post on the topic of my online teaching and my learners response to this. My hope is that it will provide a platform for discussion that will lead to a continuing though process and the most robust approach to learning online we can have during this challenging time.