Co-Teaching

This term my I had the privilege of co-teaching with a talented colleague, Mel Prasad. We both teach similar cohorts in literacy and it worked really well to have someone to bounce ideas off. This doubled our enthusiasm and halved our preparation time. Combining both groups also meant we were able to tailor the learning in a different way, as one of us could provide more support to certain groups, while the other teacher taught at a different pace for the rest of the learners. 

We hooked this kids in to creating their own super heroes and super villains, and this culminated in them creating their own plays. This also tied in to our school production, in terms of script writing and acting. We created sock puppets to act out the characters of villain or hero. 

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.

Focus Group Data

I have 5 boys who I have been targeting to make 18 months shift in 12. Here is their mid-year data... not as dismal as I had thought, but then again lots of room for improvement!

This equates to 2 boys already making 12 months progress, and 3 boys making 6 months progress in 6 months. 

Mid year data

The first set of data here at is my whole literacy group data, who have received teaching through multimodal texts.

This group consists of 20 learners comprised of 15 boys and 5 girls. From the graph below, you can see all boys have made progress, 4 boys making 12 months and 11 boys making 6 months. The girls have mixed results, for various reasons.

It is gratifying to see the shift in the boys progress; not as much as I was hoping for, especially for the learners who started the year at below or well below. My colleagues have given me more strategies to try and raise achievement even further using multimodal texts.... watch this space!

Next Steps: Inspiration from the Manaiakalani CoL

One of my colleagues in Manaiakalani is Angela Moala, a Year 4 teacher at Point England School. She is putting together a multimodal text database as part of her MIT-Spark Innovation, and this is a tremendously valuable resource for multimodal texts. The link to the doc is accessible to Manaiakalani CoL and outreach schools.

As we are doing similar inquiries, it has been great to compare Angela's journey with mine. Reflecting on this, a next step for me is to make sure I systematically include tension/challenge texts and student selected texts as part of the children's reading journey in the lesson progression.

Graphic courtesy of Dr. Rebecca Jesson, Auckland University.

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!).