New Term, New Tack!

This term my co-teaching buddy Mel and I are trying out a series of critical literacy lessons. This came from being inspired by a colleague during a PL session. 

We plan to incorporate lots of role play and drama along the way to boost the children's speaking and listening skills. 

This will hopefully be a real integration of using multimodal texts to support and extending writing. 

Our first lesson... aiming for that sweet spot!

Sharing Practice

This week we shared our teaching inquiries with our colleagues. Really amazing to hear about all that is happening in teachers' practice at Stonefields School!

A next step for me is co-teaching with my colleague Mel Prasad. We have similar literacy groups with similar needs and have been inspired to pursue teaching a deeper level of thinking through using a critical literacy approach. Watch this space!

Creating a multimodal lesson to enable making connections

This week I am trying to push these learners further into making meaning. 

My recent gap analysis of my focus group learners showed we need to work on comparing and connecting. I did this using Schooltalk.

I have crafted a workshop using 4 different texts, one of which is a chapter book. Children will explain the connections they make using the digital tool Coggle.

Reflect, Review... Try!

Thinking about maximum engagement in order to spark momentum with this group of readers... They seemed to struggle with a chapter book (10 chapters!) Even though we bolstered the learning with multi-modal experiences at certain points. Perhaps we scale back to really short chapter books for a time? For example, this type of text by Joy Cowley.

We are starting the hell pizza reading challenge this week as well - with a twist. The children will have to read at least 4 different genres of books, and create 5 book reviews. At least 3 of these book reviews will be digital. Let's link to Aurasma and the children can make our classroom walls come to life with their voice and opinions. 

Tapping into Get Epic is another resource I am trialling. At the moment the learners are reading texts on here purely for fun but I have not yet chosen a text from here to delve deeper in reading lessons. The advantage here is that the books can be 'read to me' and contain quizzes and videos, which add to the multi-modal experience and increase engagement.

Delving Deeper

I came across this reading, which is somewhat tangential, but it prompted some thoughts for me about crossing boundaries in the learning process. We refer to this as getting out of 'The Pit' in our School. 

One of my takeaways is:

'In the literature about boundary crossing and boundary objects, Akkerman and Bakker (2011) discern four learning mechanisms, one of them being transformation. 

Transformation involves confrontation and continuous work which leads to profound changes in practices where in-between, or boundary, practices may be created. They see hybridization, where “ingredients from different contexts are combined into something new and unfamiliar”, as one of the processes involved in transformation. When practices cross boundaries and engage in a creative process, something hybrid emerges.'  - Godhe and Lindstrom 2014.

Creating multimodal texts could be the creative process where the boundary is crossed, meaning engagement spills over into print-based texts as well.