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!