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.

Re-designing the learning

Checking and re-thinking... leading to redesigning

One of my hunches was that the learners had limited mileage, along with lack of engagement in texts. Our library facilitator, Anna Malan, has been instrumental in adding new and exciting texts to the collection at our school. For the first time, one of my learners actually sit and read of his own volition, totally engaged in a Minecraft Zombie book.

Being inspired by listening to some Korero Point England Blog posts, the learners are excited to create similar book reviews. Not only will they learn through multimodal texts, but they will create and share their learning through multi-modal means as well. They will eventually choose their own book to read and review, but first they needed the process of reading, summarising, evaluating, justifying, recording and sharing their book review.

Here, I have hit a road block. While the text we are reading is the right level, my hunch is the children are not used to sustained periods of reading and retaining events in the text.

What followed yesterday was a very frustrating lesson on reviewing what had happened in the chapters 1 and 2 of Rat Island (Stu Duval). Frustrating for me because I had planned to teach how to evaluate the text so far in order to scaffold their end in mind (book review).

Instead, we had to go back to basics - thinking about the text and making connections between events. 

After checking and scanning, now I need to refocus - I need to make sure I re-design their learning experiences in order that I am giving them enough time to read and evaluate. Perhaps before our reading workshops the children have to re-read the previous chapter to remind themselves of what is happening. Another scaffold may be 20 mins designated purely to reading in the lesson in order to build that mileage and dosage time of sustained reading.

Critical need for Critical Literacy

Thinking about weaving the ideas contained in this article into my literacy lessons with the view to encourage deeper questioning and making text-self text-world connections. Thinking about whether the news is trustworthy does provide scope for teaching in multi-modal means, as well as an opportunity to think deeply and critically.

Thinking about how creativity empowers learning

Great day at the Manaiakalani Digital Immersion day today. I worked with my talented Stonefields colleagues to think about how creativity empowers learning. 

Thanks to Fiona Grant for provoking our thinking and supporting us!

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.

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.