It's a friday afternoon at the end of term four, the class is busy playing. I am getting all the decodable texts ready for the following week. I put the readers into each groups box. Moments later, I turn around and two of my boys and are rushing over to their groups reading box, pulling out the new books and reading together. Success!
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Every year for the past 15 years the schools in our community of learning have created short films and shared their learning on the big screen, this year it was no different. My class made a film for the Manaiakalani Film Festival called "My Shadow".
Our inquiry topic for the term was 'Light and Shadows'. We had spent time in class learning about shadows and creating shadow art. Here are a few photos of the hands on learning experiences we enjoyed.
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A few of the children in our class wrote stories about what they noticed about their own shadows. With the support of our talented music teacher we put the our writing into a song called, "I can see my shadow".
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You can follow this link to view the movie we made and leave my tamariki a kind, thoughtful or helpful comment.
https://gisrkirby.edublogs.org/2022/11/08/manaiakalani-film-festival-my-shadow-room-1-3/
Nga Mihi,
Rebecca Kirby
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This year I have participated in the Better Start Literacy Approach micro credential. BSLA is a structured literacy approach to teaching reading and writing in Year 0/1 classrooms using the Ready to Read Phonics Plus books.
Here are some snapshot of my case study where I analysed the learning that took place for two of the children in my classroom.
Focus Child A
At baseline was unable to proficiently identify initial phonemes (6/10). The letter-sound recognition task showed that he was unable to identify the sounds that a given letter makes (1/8). He was able to proficiently complete the phoneme blending task (10/10).
After completing 40 BSLA lessons, he was now able to proficiently identify initial phonemes and blend and segment phonemes. He is now able to proficiently read set 1 and set 2 words. He is reading texts at the Tupu level.
The next steps for this child are to continue working through the scope and sequence of the BSLA whole class teaching sessions and the Phonics Plus Readers during our small group lessons. The non-word reading assessment showed that he needs to learn the “qu” sound, a_e, o_e and i_e (the magic ‘e’). These are covered in both the BSLA whole class sessions and the Phonics Plus Readers that we are yet to complete in class.
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Focus Child B
At baseline was unable to proficiently identify initial phonemes (3/10). The letter sound recognition task showed that she was unable to say the sound that a given letter makes (1/8). She was unable to proficiently complete the phoneme blending task (3/10).
After completing 40 BSLA lessons, this child was still unable to proficiently identify initial phonemes (6/10) but has shown progress. She was able to proficiently identify the sound a given letter makes with set 1 (7/8) and was unable to proficiently identify the sounds on set 2 (7/11). She was unable to blend and segment phonemes.
The next steps for this child are to participate in the explicit teaching and scaffolding provided by a tier two intervention in the classroom implemented by the classroom teacher. It will look like increasing the intensity of the small group lessons by supporting her phoneme awareness and transferring this skill to literacy tasks in a small group and providing additional exposure to the learning opportunities of Tier 1 by repeating the Tier 1 programme with the whole class (due to irregular attendance).
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I differentiated the BLSA for child A by speeding up the teaching of the scope and sequence for him during his small group sessions. The children in this group moved through the scope and sequence of the Ready to Read Phonics Plus ahead of the whole class teaching by working through one decodable per week.
I differentiated the BSLA for child B by using the small group lessons as an opportunity to create more repetition of the skills she was learning in the whole class session and to provide opportunities to practice the sounds she had learnt in previous weeks.
Child A began reading the Phonics Plus readers at the Kakano level with the level, Tap Tap, and now after 40 lessons is working the Tupu level reading the text “Frog in a Log”. Child A enjoyed seeing the Te Reo Maori kupu in the readers, and quickly learnt that the Te Reo Maori words were non-decodable.
Child B began reading the Phonics Plus readers at Kakano level, with the decodable Tap, Tap. I noticed that the Phonics Plus Readers started out difficult for emergent readers, like child B and the progressively got more challenging too quickly and didn’t provide my learners with the repetition of sounds needed for them to experience success. The use of Te Reo Maori Kupu in the Phonics Plus Readers was confusing for child B, and many other children in my class. In response to this, the school purchased the “Sunshine decodables” and found the pace of these decodables better suited many of our learners - as they provide 10 decodable texts at stage of the scope and sequence and they closely align with the scope and sequence of the BLSA. Child B is now reading the Set One ‘Sunshine Decodables’ and the text “Tap the Tin”. This is the ninth decodable in set one.
The beginning of our BSLA journey began as our school was hit with a wave of covid 19 which affected our attendance negatively for many months. We had planned to invite whanau in, but in these uncertain times it was not safe to meet with our whanau in person. I shared the BSLA information sheet with my whanau individually and spoke to them about our new approach to teaching literacy when I had the opportunity, like during school pick up and drop off times. It was encouraging to hear from whanau that they had observed their children sounding out words and practising the sounds that letters make at home without prompting. We plan to start off the year in 2023 with a Meet the Teacher evening where we will have the chance to share with our whanau the success of this year's cohort using BSLA and the continuation of this journey. This new cohort of new entrants will be Term One 2023.
A facilitator of success in our classroom was the high priority I gave to the BSLA. I ensure that all four building blocks are completed during the school day, four times a week.
A facilitator of success for my focus children was their regular and consistent attendance at school. Child A attended school 94% of the time and Child B 91% (the attendance within my classroom ranged from 32% - 95% attendance - the average being 70%). I used a Google Sheet to track my classes attendance in our BSLA sessions and I only assessed my children when they had completed 40 sessions, rather than after I had taught 40 sessions of BSLA. I built positive relationships with our whanau and worked alongside our school ‘Mutukaroa’ (school/community partnership) worker to break down the barriers to my children’s attendance.
A challenge that was faced by Child A was he was able to progress through the scope and sequence of the BSLA quicker than his peers. I provided extra support for Child A during his small group reading session by extending using the Ready to Read Phonics Plus books.
A challenge that was experienced by Child B was her ability to retain information and her lower level phonemic awareness skills. Despite being highly engaged and participating in all of my lessons she struggled to make the expected progress when tested after 40 sessions. She was very good at mimicking the other children in the class and clever at guessing the answers. A positive was that because BSLA assesses children after only 10 weeks of school her challenges were identified early and now she can get the extra support she needs from a tier two intervention.
The steps I took to identify which children in my classroom needed to participate in the Tier 2 programme were:
Completing the 10 week assessment with those children who had completed 40 BSLA sessions.
Sorting the data by the “Non-word Spelling” assessment results.
Analysing the data using traffic light colouring coding as suggested by the BSLA. I gave a high weighting to the “non-word spelling data” as this is a strong indicator of early literacy success BUT also took into account the children’s scores in other parts of the 10 week assessment and used my overall teacher judgement.
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Plan for Tier 2 support:
Teacher to provide four Tier 2 sessions a week to this small group of children using the Tier 2 lesson plans provided on Learn.
I will repeat the first 10 week of Tier 1 teaching for the whole class as during the previous lesson our classroom experienced low and irregular attendance due to an outbreak of covid 19 in our community.
Reflections on my own learning:
I feel more confident teaching literacy in my classroom. I have found the explicit nature of this approach really helpful as I now know exactly what to teach by following the lesson plans and the scope and sequence, and how to teach it.
Initially, I found that change challenging as there was a lot of new learning. My own knowledge of language was very limited at the beginning of this BSLA journey. I have learnt alot about language this year, and I am keen to continue this learning journey.
When faced with challenges and new learning I was well supported by my BSLA facilitator and my team leader (who was also taking part in the BSLA PD). We engaged in professional conversations about the BSLA and structured literacy.
This week we invited the whanau of our class into school to view the movie that we have made for the Manaiakalani Film Festival. It was amazing to see so many whanau in attendance celebrating their tamariki's learning. Here are some photos of our movie celebration. We are really looking forward to our trip to Hoyts cinema in Sylvia Park in Term 4 to see ourselves on the big screen.
Nga Mihi,
Rebecca Kirby
Today I had the opportunity to sit my Level 1 Google Educators exam and I PASSED!
A highlight for me from taking part in the DFI has been having all of the Google Tools explained to me step by step. I’ve been problem solving my way through them for years and I’ve found it very helpful to have had all the bits of puzzle I’d been missing filled in. I also found it helpful to hear the “why” that sits behind everything we do.The focus of our DFI session today was "computational thinking".
We took part in some digital and non-digital computational thinking experiences.
We worked as a team to put together a set of instructions and one of our team members had to follow the instructions to make it safely across the room.
Here is just a bit of fun using the website "code.org" to make a dance. How much fun would this be in the classroom! The children could bring their own dances to life with a dance party after they had made their dances online! So cool!
This has sparked an idea for our topic planning for term 3.
Time is so precious in the classroom so making cross curricular links is always winner! I think the oral language aspect of computation thinking is would be very beneficial to my learners - especially the directional language as this is something I have observed that they are yet to grasp! I've added in some computational thinking experiences for my learning within the Inquiry topic for next term.
Here is what I have planned so far! More to be added over time and I need to make the links the relevant curriculum areas.
Moko-ika-hiku-waru Topic Planning
On a side note - I was so amazing to come across a child's blog from Ruapotaka school sharing about this local story. I was able to leave him comment and thank him for sharing his learning.
