RPI Day 9: Sharing

Connecting
This is a part of the day that I really love being able to connect with what I have been doing in the classroom as well as hearing some thoughts and ideas from other colleagues who are part of RPI. This week Georgie gave us a would you rather link to check out which I'm really excited to try in the classroom as a warm-up activity or a way to facilitate extended discussions. Another thing I am excited to look into in more detail is my reader profile survey. I just had a thought that I would really like to look at my target group and see how much change there has been with their views on reading.

Manaiakalani: Sharing in reading
Sharing creates a connection, this really resonated with me from this session as it really shows the importance of sharing and giving the students that opportunity to share with each other and on their blogs. One thing I am keen to try in the classroom is creating a vlog style post where the students show a video of their learning and are able to be reflective on their learning. This is really powerful as it gives voice to the students and allows them to really share, I am thinking this could also be quite cool to do as a podcast where the students are able to share with each other and ask questions. 

Participating in a community of readers
Linking back to the why was really  important because it shows  where we are needing to make that shift in reading.  I would really like to set up text recommendations from the children to each other as part of our literacy rotation so that they're getting exposed to more text sets. One thing I'm really keen to check out is chapter chat. I think this will be a really cool way for me to be able to find new texts to share with the class as well as a way to find books that might be exciting and interesting that are relevant.  and another thing I really took away from this part of today was making sure that I'm planning for sharing I definitely need to update my classroom timetable to allow the opportunity  for learners to share their work on the blogs with each other with the class so that's definitely something that I will be working on in the next few weeks.

Visible reading and learning 

This was a really cool way to think about why students post on their blogs and it gives them a record of learning over time.  I think it just really reminded me of the importance of being able to share and also learners being able to share on their blogs and it's not just a blog post it's something that they can refer back to. I really liked this quote “When paired with affected instructional design, their review found that blogging can promote students' self-expression and create opportunities for higher order thinking.” It was also a really good reminder to have a blog checklist so that we are focusing on quality blog posts as well as giving me the opportunity to think about what I want the learners to blog on their blog each week.

Feedback and reflection
We looked at feedback and feed forward and the quality of feedback not the quantity. This also give me an opportunity to think about learner feedback I'm constantly giving feedback to my students on things that they are doing but I often forget about giving students the opportunity to give feedback to each other.  This is definitely something that I'm going to be adding into the classroom. Another thing that I'm excited to use is Google read and write to be able to give voice notes as feedback. Georgie also made a good point about having a writing doc for the term and being able to add new tasks each week so that feedback is still available for students so they can refer back to their writing the following week.

Collaboration and connectionI am definitely going to be adding a collaborative element into my response to text tasks where the students are able to collaborate with each other and be able to have those conversations as part of their follow-up task. Thinking ahead to next year I would like to have more opportunities for my students to read with other students within the school. Maybe set up a buddy reading system or give students the opportunity to read aloud in the library at lunchtimes. 

Whānau engagement 
This is definitely an area that I would like to work on in order to link school and home reading. I do send books home with some of my lower readers but I often forget about my high level readers and how I can make sure that they're reading at home as well and whānau are engaged with what they are reading. There were some really cool suggestions from this part of today that I'm excited to check out and use. 

Skill Builder
The skill builder today was looking at creating a kete of resources. This is something that we have as a team but it’s not currently viable. I am thinking that we spend one or two team meetings creating tasks that focus on specific skills where we have a bank of resources for ourselves  as well as our learners. 

I really enjoyed today's session looking at sharing as well as pulling the RPI together. I am very thankful to have been given the opportunity to participate in the reading practice incentive this year. I have learnt so much from all of the 9 days and I am excited to keep using this in the classroom. I am also really excited to share back with my team and think about how we can all use this going forward into next year. Huge thank you to Noami, Anna and Georgie for delivering the RPI to us over these 9 sessions, I have learnt so much! Special mention to Georgie who was my breakout group facilitator, the discussions and suggestions were really helpful, so thank you! Also massive thank you to my school leaders for allowing me this opportunity and my mentor Toni Nua who has given me some great insight and feedback onto my teaching practice in reading.

RPI Day 8 Reflections

For our homework from our last session we needed to complete another reader profile survey on our students as well as provide some create tasks that we had looked into at our last session. 

Create Tasks 
I really love the text Sunday Hero as it has a lot of key ideas to pull out from it. For my create task for this I had the students design keys that show how Oma remembered things from the past. The students then had to describe what they keys were showing and then share this with someone else in their group to respond to what they keys made them think of from the story. The one thing that was really difficult was copy and pasting the keys into Photopea which is where most of my students enjoy doing their create tasks. So next time I think I will have a PNG download of the image that they can save and then upload into Photopea. I do think it went really well having the outline of the key for them ready to go as they were then able to create with the outline already there. Some of them came up with some really cool designs which they have linked on their blog. I did really enjoy this task and I think the students did too.

Reader Profile Survey 
I did this again with the class and there was some shift but not as much as I thought their might be. One of the things that was positive though was the students rating themselves slightly higher on liking reading at school, "I am good at reading" and "My teacher thinks I am good at reading." It was also a good reminder to see what kind of texts that my students enjoy reading so I am thinking for the rest of there I will try and incorporate some of these different texts into our reading program so that the students are being exposed to a range of different texts. 

I have really enjoyed changing up my create tasks and response to texts tasks in the last few weeks and am excited to keep these going in the classroom. I have also enjoyed looking at the data from the reader profile survey and thinking about how I can add and change to my reading program to try and push those results more in a positive direction. I would like to complete this one more time next term to see if any of the other changes I have in class will make an impact. I will share this again next term!

RPI: Day 8 Create!

I really enjoyed todays session as it allowed us to be creative as well as to think about what create does look like in the classroom. I often spend a lot of time trying to come up with the prefect create task that I sometimes forget about that simpler create tasks that can be just as effective with learning and also makes all students to be able to feel successful in their tasks and their own learning. I am excited to make some changes to my create tasks in the next few weeks and gain student feedback on the types of tasks that they enjoy doing. 

Reflecting

It it always really good to start our RPI sessions looking at the homework and reflecting on what has been working in the classroom. As part of our homework we needed to have an observation of one of our reading sessions looking provocations and having group discussions. For this I was able to record one of my sessions and then go through it with my mentor Toni Nua and talk about some of the things that I could change to make sure that all of my students are sharing with each other during reading sessions. I have a small group of girls who tend to sit quietly and not engage with others during guided reading and will let others share so I was able to share this with my group this morning and gain some other ideas to try in the classroom. Thankyou Georgie! I am looking forward to trying out the post it notes with this group next week. I was also able to reflect on my own teacher wait time, I often will just answer the question and move on without giving the students the chance to agree or disagree with each other or add in something new. So I am going to be going back to basics with my ground rules for talk and allowing the students the opportunity to share during guided reading. These students are moving into the reading to learn phase of their reading journeys and we don't need to go through every single question or part of the text when we meet during guided reading they are able to be more independent with their reading and my focus for the next little while will be fostering those critical thinking conversations. 

Create 
Dorothy Burt came to talk to us about create this morning and made us think about why our learners create. This was a really great part of RPI today because it brought it back to the reason that we do create in the classroom. It was really interesting and positive to see that New Zealand has ranked 5th in the world for creativity with our 15 year olds! I think this really highlighted the importance of create and why we do it.

This morning we were asked to read a part of the poem and then design our slide with what the poem was showing. I used Crayon AI to come up with these images. It was a really interesting process as I couldn't quite get exactly what I was wanting from the images. It was really fun at the end to then compare what we had done and the imagery that was given from the poem. I do get a bit nervous with creativity myself as I feel like I am not very artistic but being about to use these tools made me feel a lot more confident in being able to share my take on the image. 

Routine Opportunities
We looked at a range of different create tasks and were able to create some tasks that were asking the students to design and create. This was a really nice time to be reminded that not all of these create tasks need to be elaborate but we can do this smaller design tasks that I think will allow the students to be able to feel successful in what they are doing in reading. I love the text Sunday Hero and it was really fun to come up with a stencil task for this. I am really excited to do this in class and see what the students can create. 

Choice 

I really enjoyed looking at some different things that we can try in the classroom and have students to use to create. I often forget about the great tools like "Storyboard That!" and using quizzes for students to be able to create. I have been looking at this as a follow up task using a doc and having students ask each other questions but I really like the idea of making this into a activity where students can create their own quiz to share with each other. 

Book Trailer

This was a really fun activity, we were able to create a book trailer for a book that we really like to be able to sell to someone else. I actually really enjoyed doing this and this is definitely something that I will try and do in the classroom. It will be really interesting to see students recommending books to each other. 

Longer Create Tasks

I really liked looking at the novel study sites and am thinking how cool this would be to have in our space as a resource. I always have good intentions to start a novel study but it never comes to fruition we get half way through and stop. I feel like creating a site where the students can go will keep me accountable in being able to complete this until the end of the book. 

Overall I really enjoyed today and I got so much out of it to bring into the classroom in the next three weeks. I am looking forward to implementing some of these create tasks and seeing how the students go. I am also looking forward to working on the collaboration aspects with my students because I know they love to work and share together so it will be really fun to see what types of things we create in the next few weeks!

RPI Day 7: Thinking

Sharing and reflecting
This morning we started with sharing about our successes and challenges since our last session. I really enjoy this part of the session as we are able to share different thoughts and ideas with each other. During this time I was reflecting on how I am completing my vocabulary and word work activities. I have been doing this separately and having a spelling task for overall words but what I would like to try next week is have my vocabulary tasks instead of overall spelling and they will hopefully nicely link my reading and writing. Some other suggestions to check out from this morning is using the Cambridge dictionary and online voice recorder to record discussions. I am also really keen to check out other people's vocabulary tasks that they have created and try to incorporate some of these into my own planning.

Smart thinking for smart learners
I really enjoyed hearing from Dorothy and being connected to some different tools that we can use in the classroom to engage our learners to make them think. I will definitely be looking into the fake news sites that have been created and link my class and team back to the fake news Cybersmart lessons as a way to introduce this to the students. I am really excited to look into Squiz Kids and use this in the classroom. We have also been looking at podcasts as a school and I am really excited to use this with the students as I think it will be a really great tool for students to be able to record themselves reading and remove all of that background noise from the classroom. 

Higher Order Thinking
It was really great to look at different examples of questions that we can be asking our students during guided reading sessions dn then incorporating these into follow up activities as well. I think I often can create literal and interpretive questions but I often leave out the evaluative questions where students need to make a judgement based on the information from the text. I know that my students will really love this challenge and I am looking forward to using this in the classroom in the coming weeks.

Analysis

We looked at Blooms in detail during this part of the day which was really interesting. I have seen this model before but never really deep dived into it and we were given a really great explanation of it and how we can use this in the classroom. I have learnt a new tool of using highlight on PDF which I am very excited to use in the classroom. I have previously been printing off the text for the students to highlight old school so I am really keen to try this out. One big takeaway from this session was showing a competing definition of a word to counter the evidence as this will really make the students think a lot more critically. I will be using this in my planning next week so will let you know how this goes! 

Explore 
One key thing we discussed today that has stuck with me is students not just being passive consumers of a text, we want them to be able to think critically about what they are reading. We looked at a range of different digital organisers that support the exploration of texts. I am quite excited to create some of these and use these in the classroom in the coming weeks. 

Critical Analysis 
We also had a deep dive into perspectives and positioning and how we can make sure to add this into our literacy program. With perspectives we looked at creating provocations about a theme in a text, this was something that I initially struggled with because I think I was thinking too much about it. However once I started to read the text and pick out the key messages and ideas I could feel the cogs in my brain turning to find a provocation linked to my text. I am really excited to bring this to my reading groups next week and focus on having those discussions during and after our sessions. I am interested to see how the students tackle this for the first time and can’t wait to hear their thoughts and ideas around the topic. As I think about this I also remember a key thing from this part of the day and that is exploring the fact that disagreement can be risky and we need to make sure that we have a discussion around what it means to share a thought and opinion as a group. So I may start out with an introduction piece to get the students comfortable with having a position or idea that not everyone might agree with. 

We also explored how to be purposeful and to add bias for the students into texts that can lead to discussions. I really liked how Naomi had used the text Jump and taken other parts out of this text to lead to a bias that the students could very easily see once it was pointed out as well as a great way to build and foster conversations and discussion around this. This really made me think about how I need to be more intentional with some of the key messages and ideas that I pull out of the text as well as explicitly bringing these ideas out during guided reading. I have reflected during this time that this is something that I need to work on, I need to explicitly put this information in my planning so that we are able to bring it out during our guided reading sessions. 

Response to text
Finally today we looked at how to create a response to text task that will really make the students think critically about what they are reading. We were given the opportunity to plan for a group for next week and I am looking forward to seeing what my students create from this text, guided reading and response to text task. 

I thoroughly enjoyed today's session and I have taken a lot away with me. We had a chance to reflect on Planning for Higher Order Thinking and what we could change in our teaching practice to ensure that this is happening in the classroom. You can see from the image I have added above I have lots of areas that I would like to work on in the next three weeks in order to plan for Higher Order Thinking. So I am very excited to see what the next three weeks brings and I cannot wait to share what my students come up with and share with each other during discussions. 

RPI Day 6 Reflection and Changes

After our last RPI session we were asked to have a look at our word work and see how we were timetabling for this in the classroom. This was something that I was focusing on during guided reading and pointing out key words as we were reading however I wasn't actively involving this into my follow up tasks. I have tried a few new things since our last RPI day and I have loved putting them together and my students have enjoyed looking at key words in greater detail. One thing I have really focused on brining back to my literacy program is spelling words and linking these back to the texts that we are reading to give the students more opportunities to see and use these words. 

Spotlight
This has been a great activity that I have been trying in small groups as well as the whole
class. The thing I really like about this activity is that it make the students think about each of the words before we even begin reading the text and allows some of the students who do know what the words mean the opportunity to share with their peers. This activity has also been really beneficial after reading. I have been working with groups through this step so far but it has been great to locate the word with the students and have them reread the sentence or paragraph to find clues about what each word could mean. I am interested to see how the students go working together without teacher input for this part of the activity, so watch this space I will report back with how that goes and the best way to monitor that. 

Word Associations
This has been another activity that I have tried in the last few weeks and the students really enjoy it with being about to connect these words to different words to make sense of the word or to make meaning. After the initial stress of trying to find words that are associated I have also enjoyed preparing this task and walking the students through it and I think it has been really beneficial. 

When have/might you ..?
This is another thing that I have added in which is still developing with my groups. I have
found they are able to think about where the answer but need to elaborate on the answer. The one thing I have found hard with this is finding a good voice recording tool for the students to use on their chromebooks so that I am able to hear the discussions that they are having. 

Next steps
After meeting with my RPI mentor Toni Nua we have come up with a few other things that I can try in the classroom to develop students understanding and knowledge of words. One thing that I am going to try as an overview of a topic or an introduction to a topic is Wordplosion. This will help the students to be able to look at the root words and then be able to build on these words looking at the word families as well as looking at synonyms for words. I am quite excited to try this and I think it lends itself really nicely with our topic for this term. 

RPI Day 6: Vocabulary

I absolutely loved todays session, the focus was around vocabulary and getting our students excited about words. My biggest takeaway was that vocabulary improvement plays a critical role in all aspects of our teaching, this can be either topic specific vocabulary or looking at those tier II words. 

Connecting with Manaiakalani

Our first session with Dorothy Burt this morning was really insightful and I got a lot out of it. I will admit google docs is not an application that I use a lot in the classroom I often revert to slides but after today I will be making changes to how I use google docs. There is so many great things that can be created in docs and I am excited to try some of these new things out in the classroom especially around vocabulary and adding these into my follow up activities and planning. This is definitely a slide deck I will be going back to for ideas on how to change up my follow up tasks and pre reading tasks. 

Background Knowledge

This image slide really resonated with me and made me think about how important vocabulary is to our students. I really liked the use of the spotlight activity and again this is something that I will be using in the classroom. I think it will be a really effective way to see where my learners are at before even reading the text and seeing what our next steps are going forward, this could also pick up other key words that might need some extra focus. Another thing that was a lightbulb moment was reading words into contexts. We were given some really great tools that I will look into using and will just make it a key part of my planning as well.

Word Conciseness

We had a chance to look at some really cool vocab games and challenges that we could try in the classroom. I know my class will love them so am excited to take this back with me into the classroom next week.  This part of the session really highlighted my need to have a visible word wall and this is something that has been added to my holiday to do list!

Explicit, robust learning opportunities 

Looking into tier II words in more detail was really good and being explained the lexical-bar was really interesting. The thing that stood out most and got me thinking about how I can do this is bridging the gap between at home language and school language. This is interesting as it is something that I have been discussing with my class a lot lately especially around professional and unprofessional environments. I really liked the term survival words and I think that is a really important thing to be thinking about when introducing a text to students. 

Cracking Unfamiliar Words

I loved this session as it really made me stop and think about what I actually do in the classroom to make sure that students can chunk words and how they can tackle hard words they come across. I have a lot more tools that I am keen to try out in the classroom and focus on not just looking at this with my lower readers but my higher readers as well. Syllables has been something that we have started looked at with writing poems and I really like the chin test to see how many syllables each word has. 

Morphology

I have really reflected on this part of the day and looked into my teaching practice and seeing where this actually currently fits in my planning and this is definitely an area that I need to put more focus on. I haven't really added this into my long term planning and it becomes something that is occasionally looked at during guided reading or as a vocabulary follow up slide that is never really delved into deeper. I am going to be adding word work into my timetable going forward and there are so many amazing and creative ways that I will be able to do this. I am looking at having a shared text for Matariki next week and am really keen to try out some of the new things that I have learnt today. Spelling progressions is another thing that I am keen to try and look into, I know we have a list that we work off so am going to locate that and add that to part of the program. 

I have really learnt a lot from today and I am really excited to incorporate many of these new ideas in the classroom from next week. I will be adding this to my long term planning. We have planning for learning coming up next week and I am really excited to share this learning with my team and see how we can all incorporate this into our planning. I have decided that I would love to try a word for the day and have different puzzle activities for my students. I am very excited to have those reading and writing connections which I am going to have in my planning so looking at the same sort of text for reading that we will use in our writing to strengthen both areas. I also have lots of my own learning around some of these things we have learnt today which I am excited about. I really did get a lot out of todays session and I am looking forward to next week and the changes that I am going to implement. 

Adjustment Reflections

Our last RPI session was around our literacy timetables, independent activities, reading apps and making reading-writing links. Since our last session we have been asked to make some tweaks and changes to our practice that aligned with the last session. I have made a few changes and tried out a few new things which I will reflect on in this blog post. 

Timetabling
I haven't had much of a chance to change up my timetable for seeing groups during literacy however I have made changes to what each of these groups are doing when they come and see me. I try to see each of my groups each day during literacy to either have a guided reading session, writing session or a check in with each of the groups. I have made my groups for reading and writing the same so that I am able to change up what we are discussing as required. This has been really helpful in trying to implement new activities. One of the things I have reflection on since our last RPI session is to not be afraid to use group time to go through activities so this has been really helpful. 

Reading Apps
One thing that I have started to implement in the classroom is the read along app where students read aloud to their chromebooks and their voices are picked up and they are given stars for words they get correct and then opportunities to learn how unfamiliar words are said. The students have really loved using this tool and love seeing how many stars that they can get. Another thing I have changed with my reading apps is how I use Epic! I have now been working on giving students extra texts related to the topic of the week so they are having more reading milage on a particular topic. 

Turn-it-in sheets
I had really grand plans of changing my turn-it-in sheets but unfortunately with reports being due and being out of the classroom for a week due to a family matter I haven't had the chance to change this yet. I will work on changing this up over the holidays, my students are already really familiar with using a turn-it-in sheet I just want to make it fancier with a progress bar like some of the ones we looked at during RPI session 5. So watch this space, new layout coming soon!

Reading-writing links
This is something that I have really loved trying to incorporate with my students. I have been making sure to take the time to identify links at any opportunity so that the students are able to see these links a bit better. I tried out the suspenseful beginning task with my class which was an interesting experience. In reflection I should have modelled this better the first time and gone through it step by step to make sure the students understood the brief. There was a lot of confusion along the lesson as I could have made it more explicit, however the end product was great and the students by the end really enjoyed it. I will definitely do this again and I think I will use the same prompt so that the students know what they are doing and will so this as a whole class. Toni Nua came in and observed this lesson and we had a really great conversation after this lesson with some next steps and things that I could have done differently and will definitely take on board when I do this lesson again. 

It has been a great few weeks making tweaks and changes and I am really excited to keep these things going in the classroom. These are also really great tools and ideas that I will take into term 3 with me as well as share with my team so that we can all do this in our space for term 3!