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.

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. 

Tools to Gain an Accurate Learner Profile

Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools. (WFRC? #3)

Creating an accurate student profile is an important part of an effective inquiry. As I considered what this might look like I thought about what data I needed to best answer my question. 

Will increase discussion between learners and deliberate acts of teaching vocabulary improve achievement across multiple curriculum areas? 

First of all I want to build the picture of my target learners across multiple curriculum levels. This means looking at reading and writing achievement, maths achievement and wider curriculum achievement and interest. While I will focus on my whole class during this inquiry, I want to have a target group of my year 4 learners. These are all learners I had in my class last year and they make up the group of students in my class who are working well below their age in reading, writing and maths. 

Given these consideration I have decided the data I will collect with include:

1. A student voice survey, this survey will establish motivation in learning, the level of discussion they believe they have in class, how learning focused they think their discussion is and how they view their achievement. 

2. Star and PAT Maths/Reading data. This will provide a level of achievement in reading and maths. 

3. Running record data, this will provide some areas of need in reading and a level of decoding and comprehension. 

4. E-asstle writing data and a word count of writing sample. I will also compare sample to look at the types of words used and use "What every primary school teacher should know about vocabulary" as a reference text for this. 

5. Deliberate observation of student discussion with and without the teacher. I will ask another teacher to come and observer and make notes to get a clear picture of discussion. 

6. Picture vocabulary test to see what the extent of learners vocabulary is.