Collection of information around implementation

My next step and part of my inquiry is to see how I can collect information around what I have implemented in the classroom in regards to my inquiry question. I will discuss these ideas in detail below. 

Spelling: In order to see how my students are going with vocabulary I will be running weekly spelling tests. We will have a pretest on Monday before the students have seen the words to see how many of these words they are able to spell correctly. We will then have a post test on Friday morning where the students have had to opportunity to practice and use these specific words for the week. I will then compare pre and post test data to see how they students are going with the new words. These will be recorded in an excel spreadsheet each week along with how much time the learners were given to practice their spelling in class time that week. 

Anecdotal notes: I would like to each week work with students individually on my CoL release and listen to the students read aloud one on one. During these session I will record anecdotal notes to see what are the key areas that each individual students needs to work on with decoding and comprehension. With some of my target learners I have found many of them will read too quickly and often miss out the endings of words which again can have an effect on the meaning of those particular words. I will record this by using a google doc with the date and notes that I have taken during that particular session. 

Word wall: I will continue using this in the classroom I will access how this is used by seeing if the students are using these words in conversations, discussions along with writing and research tasks they are completing each week. 

Spot check running records: I will continue to complete running records when I feel that a student in my target group has made some progress and may need to be tested at the next level. Again I can use this data with detailed notes from the running records to see how the students are progressing and also gain perspective on the areas of learning that are required. 

Restating my inquiry question

We are now at the beginning of term 3 which means that we are halfway through the year. In our CoL meeting this week we have been asked to think about our inquiry question and make sure that we have not lost sight of the main goal that we set out at the beginning of this inquiry. We have been asked to restate our questions. This is something that I have been thinking a lot about in my planning for learning this term as well as looking at my data collected at the end of last term from running records and annotations from guided reading sessions. My questions still remains however I am still continuing to look at those other students of mine who are currently sitting at where they need to be for reading. These students are almost a extra target group of mine to focus on to make sure that even though they are where they need to be now they are still getting that push to the next bracket to make sure they wont begin the year next year below where they need to be. 

Inquiry Question: How can I change my teaching to support my students who are reading between the ages of 8 - 9 years in order to make the shift required in reading. 

My hypothesis is around vocabulary being an important aspect of reading acceleration for not only my target group of learners but also all of my learners in the classroom. 

Updated data

This is the data that I have collected from our mid year reports and running record data that was completed at the end of term 2. The first graph shows reading ages from the PM running records from Feb 2021 and then again in June 2021. You can see there is a slight increase for some of the target learners with some still sitting at the same reading age. I have also looked at the PM reading level data from Feb 2021 and June 2021 which can be seen below. 

Again this data show that there are some improvements in reading levels from the beginning of the year to now and there are some that have still stayed the same. 

Where to next?
From looking at this data and the running record notes that I have taken there are some areas that need further development and learning. I did notice that some of my students were more equiped in the running records to answer the vocabulary questions and are trying hard to read in new vocabulary. This is something that we will continue to work on during this term. Along with other aspects of comprehension. The majority of my students passed the reading and decoding part of the text but it was the comprehension that showed there were some gaps in the learning which is what we will focus on this term.