Reflection on Term 1

Term 1 was hard. In terms of shifting the students as much as I would like, we had time constraints and timetable interruptions which took away from time I would have spent teaching. Some of these things included morning swimming sessions from week 5-8. Due to the nature of my hub and the makeup of my literacy group (year 4, 5, 6) this was certainly not helpful, as each year group had different swim times on different weeks.
Our recent environmental focus also interrupted the timetable considerably in the past 3 weeks, which has meant that my literacy group has had 2 less sessions per week than normal. 

As frustrating as this was, these timetable interruptions were unavoidable, so I am looking forward to Term 2, spending some quality time with my reading groups, really digging deep and getting into a learning journey that is uninterrupted.

Term 2 be like:

One of my hunches was to do with reading mileage. The learners in my group have not had a huge amount of mileage, and so one of my objectives is to get them to read more. Using ReadTheory and Get Epic was great - they were using this in class and at home sometimes. I found that the students were really engaged with this, but I also know a lot of learners still do not read regularly at home. 

This is something that I need to help the group with next term - providing space and opportunities for them to practising reading a wide variety of texts, whether that be online or a physical book. Running a weekly competition might be a way forward here... watch this space!

Multi modal texts - lesson example

This term we have been delving deeper using multimodal texts by doing lessons like this. It involves reading a text, watching a short video and navigating a webpage. 

Alongside this is teaching deeper concepts, such as this one about making connections. It is a lot of content to get through for the group of learners I am teaching, especially due to their need to be refocussed often in the lesson. 

Last week we thought about skimming and scanning and it was great to see the learners using this strategy in their latest reading test to answer comprehension questions. My hope is that they can remember these strategies throughout the year and beyond in order to make them better readers.