Graduate profile - Super learning Powers

Super Learning Powers Term Two

Arranging for explicit acts of teaching and learning -
Developing understanding the key comp entices AKA Graduate profile
These are woven throughout the day. For the purposes of this blog my focus is on the children articulating what makes a great learner. The Key comp and the dispositions from the graduate profile have been linked to super learning powers as we have a poster display in this genere and the children relate to this idea.

Now - Keep expanding on the children's understanding and highlight the dispositions in action as well as supporting the children to set goals and evaluate hoe well they are going with the dispositions on the graduate profile

Science with Mike A Play based learning theme

Term Three  - Week One
31 July
Mike is taking the class for three science based sessions with play learning integrated.
This is challenging my current practices and provoking a lot of thought about play learning and comparison with established teaching practices.

Children have designed a fitness circuit to make their legs stronger for cross country. The board shows the curriculum documents as I make links and post photos of the children to see saw to share with their fmilies

My BIG QUESTION
Is it really better?  What is it better for?
This afternoon it was great to have the opportunity to really look at the entire curriculum displayed on a white board and reflect on what exactly the children were doing.
Benefits of play based learning I found  so far....

• Great opportunity to stand back and really observe the children
• Good space for Key Competences to be observed and for the children to put them into action in a natural way as they related with each other, negotiated and compromised. 
• It is a fairly uncontrived environment and the children really got to use their agency and their good judgement
• The children have the opportunity to be creative and use their thinking and imagination to play

As I became more aware of the opportunities to see the Curriculum in ACTION- I noticed that the children were working in many curriculum areas simultaneously, Dramatic play-ARTS, Measuring and Estimating, MATH, Writing and creating words, ENGLISH, Health and PE as they managed risk.

It was also interesting to note much of what they were doing I would not notice within the regular class programme.

It was very challenging for me to see this as good enough to make a post and to send to the child's parents on see saw. Would they see value in this (as real learning) or view it as trival?

Next Steps -  Develop greater familiarity with the curriculum
                   - Continue to do schedule regular slots for play based learning for my class and develop my own thinking and level of comfort with how it fits into my concept of 'real learning".

Grandparents Day

Tuesday 3 July - Grandparents Day

Open Maths Task

Week 8 Open Maths tasks-Pro loading for geomentry starting week 9

Play Learning Obversation

On Friday 19 June -  Kea Class  Played outside with the loose parts

Working together, planning, solving problems and co-operating, taking turns

Lots of talk and negotiating as they constructed the potion mixer place

Writing -

Writing

The children self select a goal to focus on as a "next step"
These goals are discussed and displayed this provides a visual reminder for the children.
The children buddy check their goal and highlight where they have done their goal i.e. the evidence
This term the Proof reading part of the writing process has been introduced and the children are developing independence with doing this with a buddy.
We proof read a piece of writing together and made corrections with a red pen and then displayed this as a prompt and example of what to do. The children often refer to this. They enjoy using a red pen to proof read and make corrections

This Week we are working on Excellence- This is the E part of the Eskdale school values
CARE. This value was selected after discussion with the children and they voted for Excellence as the value that best fitted with persevering and working hard.




Providing the children with multiple experiences to build up their ideas and vocabulary ver a period of time before writing is proving successful. After reading the story about Manukura the white kiwi the children became interested in Kiwi so I went with their interest. Over a period of 4 weeks we have read a lot of Kiwi books, collected Kiwi facts - Written kiwi facts and painted Kiwi.

This week we have been pretending to be a Kiwi out on a typical night's foraging.
The children role played this using their knowledge and imagination. This gave me great insight into their learning. We brainstormed interesting words with a focus on verbs and adjectives.
When the children came to write they were very motivated and focused.

Highlighted Evidence of personal goal


Next steps to get the children tracking the achievement of their goal using the adapted LLps for Junios

Slipper Party Reward

On Friday 18 May Kea class had a fun day as a Reward. 

 The Reward was earnt by listening to instructions and following instructions straight away.

Each child had a dollar chart and every time they were using listening five or were following instructions they were rewarded with a pretend dollar. This Reward system worked very well over a 10 day period to put a focus on positive behaviours. 

The rewards were selected and agreed on by the children. They were very motivated to earn enough dollars to have all of the rewards. We all had fun on slipper day. This helped to build relationships between the children and myself as we had the chance to interact in a fun environment. may parents also commented and thanked me for making a fun day. 

I Y training golden nugget "You get more of what you focus on."

Carolyn Webster-Stratton,PHD

This reward also fitsthe Incredible years Teaching pyramid  building positive relationships between teacher, children and parents,  as well as motivation through incentives and giving attention and praise to desired behaviors as a way of decreasing inappopriate behaviours

Literacy - Learning Buddy work

 Self Selected - Buddy Activities During Reading 

Students engaged in independent word work from their box of independent activities, which is a must do during reading time.
Children are able to choose the buddy they want to work with the the activity they want to practise.
All the activities shown in the photos are aimed to reinforce reading and writing of CVC words.



Many of the activities are designed to reinforce phonics knowledge. There is often a reading and writing component as the buddy reads the word and the other writes the word and then they check and swap roles.
The children enjoy being a "learning buddy," and supporting each other.








Practising reading simple CVC words.
This game engages the children to continue practicing the same skill in another context.
 

Junior swimming sports

The Junior Swimming sports were held at school on the 13 March. The parents were invited to watch. The children had a range of races to choose from. Students self selected the races they wanted to participate in. There was a selection of races to suit all abilities. All children had opportunities to practice and gain confidence prior to the swimming sports. This was a fun event with the emphasis on participation and enjoyment. It was about challenging yourself and having a go.
Many parents attended and we received a lot of positive feedback

Children shared their thoughts about the swimming sports using the seesaw app. parents who were unable to attend really appreciated this.

Where to next     - see if the children can come up with a relay event

EOTC - Science Community Planting -Growing Term 2

Following on From Term 1

When we looked closely at sa variety of seeds and discovered flowers make seeds. we als planted ornamental cabbages in the garden for a winter display and looked at parts of the plant, leaves, roots e.t.c.
All children selected their own bulb to look at closely and sketch. The labeled the parts they thought they may know and formulated questions to investigate using I notice..I think...I wonder..
It was revealing how many children were not able to transfer the knowledge about parts of a plant to this seemingly foreign object a bulb. Some called the roots hair and one thought the roots were a birds nest and a bird would come and nest in it. This was a good initial assessment activity to tune myself in and identify where to take the learning next. It also highlighted the importance of providing the children with multiple experiences of the same concepts in difference contexts to strengthen their ability to transfer and apply their prior learning.  We then planted the bulbs we cut into sections as the children wondered if they might grow.
We used the expertise of Mrs Rolls to demonstrate how to plant a bulb.
We also planted a large pot with bulbs to beautify our environment for everyone to enjoy. the pot

Cross sections to motivate children to look closely, I notice, I think, I wonder....
Children generated questions to investigate and were surprised to discover bulbs are sticky and wet on the inside and dry and dead looking on the outside

Planting a bulb to observe growth


Watering the bulbs

Independent Reading & Student Agency

Photos/Video 11 May 2018

During independent reading time students have agency over who they choose to read with and what they choose to read. Some of them chose to engage in reciting the Eskdale School Pepeha and another group worked together to read a poem and develop actions. The children working together are all at different instructional reading levels and they supported and encouraged each other by reading a line again and by developing actions to support others in their group to remember the lines of text or tricky words within the text.  All children were engaged during this time working on reading.

Where to next;
Capitalise on this by discussing with them how they feel during this time and what they like / don't like about buddy reading time. Make explicit all the wonderful skills they are using when they are working together

Working together to recite a poem and inventing actions to match the words. 

Meet The Teacher Information Evening

Meet the Teacher Parent Information Evening Week Three of Term 1

Jo and I worked together to develop a presentation to show to the parents. This included information about a typical day and what it looked like, our school values, as well as information about how parents could support their child's learning at home.
Link to our google slide presentation
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1e8m9y8LFY7Pan-u6ZnJtmd9a7vejrICh_WMfyh8oqgk/edit#slide=id.p3

We also explained how we would be using the seesaw app this year to communicate maths home work.

This presentation was loaded onto the school website so parents could view it again or those who were unable to attend could access the information.

Evaluation  Term 2 from parent feed back and queries throughout Term 1

In response to several inquires from parents during term one I realized we had not clearly communicated the homework aspect of the basic facts ladders. Parents were also confused that when the child loaded their next step onto seesaw that the child needed to work on this at home.

In response to this need I loaded more information on to seesaw for the parents.

Next year we need to place more emphasis on the basic facts ladders and the fact that these ladders are the child,s home work.

Key Points -SENCO Powerpoint August 2017

Reading of Powerpoint  - Child Development Service 
 August 2017
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1kyK5XAkHFvS24v_8yOav4-FnLja6Xy0ylfa1JwR117Q/edit#slide=id.p18

Key Points

•  Involve parents Early, gather vital info about child from parents,  complete a parent questionnaire with parents.
•  Ensure Parents consent to referral and are on the same page as school and are kept in the loop 
•  Gather all data necessary and examine for child's strengths and areas of need 

N.B. can be long waits as children are pirotised and those most in need identified and seen first 

• Multidisciplinary approach
• Different pathways for individual children to ensure individual needs are met

Inquiry Team - Rich Tasks

Rich Tasks

Today we redefined this as Rich contexts after our readings and collaboratively began to complete our inquiry spiral. We scanned our readings and clarified our collective understanding of Rich tasks and decided with our new understanding to call it rich contexts. Focusing: We have decided to focus on ensuring teachers understand what Rich Tasks are and then using these to foster student agency and Key Competencies.

Scanning: 26 February 2018

We discussed the definition of our Inquiry and decided we need to do some readings around what is
a rich task to make sure we all have the same understanding before we can truly understand what
we are tasked with doing.  BJ shared the Inquiry folder with the team so we can all add articles in.
We also want to find out what our maths data is saying. What data do we have? How do we gather
this data at the different levels?

We looked at the EFS Guiding Principles and the Science Capabilities.

Guiding Principles or EFS

http://www.enviroschools.org.nz/enviroschools-programme/guiding_principles

PAT data for math showing year group comparisons (yr 4-8, 2016-2017)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b7c5xjj5WIfVLckpIFu_HGJWa1pBJezz7aoumBD4dTc/edit?usp=sharing

Pass on data sheet by class may be worth looking at for junior school math data- but no ‘set place’. Is our class edge musac worth exploring?

Science capabilities questioning sheet

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B5osH6Er0vKtEzGL0XY2bBnayLeA7mNKbfbAy83KWWU/edit?usp=sharing

Focusing

Slide Presentation Developed to show where we are at as a team and presented 
to staff W10 T22018
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nq3EefYbq9qjx-3npeffgJD3nJOH6NFYFTYVK8dwL0M/edit#slide=id.p

Learning 

Shared Inquiry Folder Google Drive