Where to in 2023?

Last year as I interviewed for CoL 2023 and "dreaming" about this year my inquiry focus was to continue to look at reading but this year look at extending my students who are reading at the ages of 9-10 years. I decided upon this from looking at my data in front of me as I had not seen these students in action with reading so to speak. Now that I have come into this year and observed my students and their reading I have come up with some wonderings that I think could shape my inquiry for this year which I will outline in my blog post below.

9-10 year readers

As I have read with this group I have found that they are able to comprehend literal questions directly related to what they are reading. I have also front that with some teacher prompting they are able to start to answer inferential questions. The reason that I wanted to focus on this group of students is because they are currently "at" where they should be for their age. They are reading at their current chronological age. Looking at data from previous year and the data of the year 6's as the progress into year 7 I can see that many of these students then get almost "stuck" for lack of a better word at this reading age and don't progress into that next reading age bracket. So my question around this would be, what can I do to help extend this readers to continue on with reading success.

7-7.5 year readers

I have a number of students who are reading at this age level in my class this year. After reading with them over the last few weeks I can see that they are able to answer the questions really well they are understanding what they are reading, however it is the decoding that is still stopping them from being able to read the text and new words that they come across. I have not had a group of students reading at this level in my class for a few years now so it has been an interesting look into how they are reading and what I can do to help them get to where they need to be as 9 and 10 year old students. My question around this would be how to accelerate these readers so they are at the same reading age as their chronological age. 

Thoughts and Ideas:

As I have been thinking about these two different groups of students and what way my inquiry might lean towards I have been reminded of the end goal of extending those readers and making sure that they are able to access level 4 curriculum reading when they reach year 7 and 8. This has made me think about inquiring into how I can extend those learners further to ensure that as they reach year 6 next year they are at or above their reading age and thinking more critically. Then in a round about way the implementation I have for this group could be applied to the other group of learners and how I can extend them once they have grasped the concept of decoding. The group of students reading between the ages of 7-8 years has made me think about my MIT inquiry I did in 2019 which looked at these students and created a tool that would be perfect for this group this group to utilise. As you can see from this post my thoughts are still all over the place at this stage but I have started to think about which direction I would like to go in. I have spoken to Danni Stone (CoL across schools teacher from Pt England) and I am hoping to have her come into the classroom and observe a reading lesson with some of my students and see if that can spark a more direct inquiry direction, so watch this space!

Where to next?

In the next few weeks I would like to complete running records on both groups that I am thinking about in order to establish the gaps and work ons for these students. As well as seeing how the summer holidays have impacted their reading and

testing. I am also still very much interesting in students reading enjoyment so will be conducting some surveys around this. Overall I just want to establish where my students are at then hopefully have a clearer direction for my inquiry. 

Reflection

In reflection it has been a very interesting few weeks back at school, by now I would have normally established solid routines with my class and my reading sessions would be in full swing however this is not the case. But I have to keep reminding myself we would normally be in week 4 and would have had at least one full week of learning at school. This year we haven't had the most normal start unfortunately with the flooding and then the cyclone that has come through, so we are taking each day at a time and trying to figure out this direction of my inquiry that most importantly with benefit my learners.

"Normal" Start to the Year

 I really wanted to document the start of our year as again it has started off a little bit differently than we would have expected! I was so excited for the start of this year, I think in a way it signified the normalisation of covid and our new reality and that school can go on in person rather than having this back and forth of lock down and hybrid learning. I guess in a way I was looking forward to that "normal" start to the year. Unfortunately that didn't go according to plan, we started a week later than expected due to the devastating floods that occurred in Auckland. Thankfully we were blessed enough to miss this directly however this has impacted many people on our lives and communities. I think as teachers we are very used to this sudden change and try and adapt accordingly.

Week Two?
Finally day one arrived and it was very happy environment and I was all set to get everything up and running as I normally do at the beginning of the year. Week two now became week one again and we were all set up ready to go, reading lessons and expectations set up and directions for my inquiry starting to take shape. We have a weather warning about the following week but treating it as business as usual for our new week 2. Unfortunately again a devastating weather event meant the closure of school and again another interesting week. No school on Monday, Tuesday we were open (We only had 12 students in my space of 54!). Wednesday trying to find that some sort of normal again! 

The last few years have taught me many things about myself and my students and that is we are adaptable. Very much like this inquiry it is adaptable! I think about this as we get ready for our first CoL PLG for the year, that guilt of not having an inquiry set in stone but then the realisation that we are adaptable, my inquiry is adaptable and most importantly my inquiry is about my learners. My learners and what they are going through will have an impact on my inquiry and the shape that it takes. So I take a step back to reflect on the start of the year that we have had and realise that it will come to me eventually, the most important thing at the moment is a happy, resilient classroom set up on the foundation of kindness and support is the best thing to start with.