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!

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.

Science a Winner

For the last 2 weeks, I have been taking a different tack, using shorter texts which interlink. The strong science component has really hooked the boys in as there is a chance to do practical work as well. 
We have been making connections across texts, and discussing different text types.

Lesson example: making connections across texts.

This has proved for some rich discussion paired with the multimodal media. Overall, the boys enjoyed this more than the longer chapter book we used (even though that was about pirates and rats!).

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.