Inquiry 2024: Structured phonics

This year my inquiry question is:

How do I effectively teach a structured approach to phonics?

Most people would quickly recommend BSLA or another structured literacy programme. 

Great news! I will begin training in BSLA next term.
However, in the mean time, I have started my own phonics plan with my reading class. 

At the beginning of the year, Charlotte Walker (teaches the other half of year 3), carefully placed children in each of our reading classes based on their reading ages. We noticed that there was a large chunk of students reading at blue and green on the colour wheel (5.9-6 years of reading age). Therefore, we placed all 21 of them into my reading class together.
I noticed big gaps in their basic phonics knowledge. Many of them had good comprehension but struggled to decode. 

Therefore, I decided to base my inquiry on these children.

Something to ponder..
The children that were taught BSLA in year 2 had much stronger decoding strategies than those that didn't do BSLA. However, I noticed that several of these BSLA students had poorer comprehension and found it more difficult to make predictions, retell a story or infer. So my question is, how do I focus on phonics whilst also reading stories that are rich and give the students a lot to talk about? 

I am currently balancing a mix of phonics lessons (Sunshine Decodables) and PM books (with a focus on comprehension) in my weekly plan.

So far, I have been following the Ready to Read scope and sequence as well as the Sunshine Decodables Scope and sequence. I have identified the letter sounds, digraphs and blends that each group needs to work on and teach at a small group level as well as at a whole class level when introducing new phonics of the week. 

Not only are we focussing on phonics through books and whole class lessons, we also play games, watch videos, use flashcards and make use of our class library. My class has been enjoying choosing whichever books they'd like to read alongside a phonics task (as seen in photos below).

After only 3 weeks of a big focus on phonics, I have already noticed a difference in my class' confidence to decode unfamiliar words. I'm looking forward to seeing the progress that they make and will keep you updated. 

Inquiry 2023: Spicing up the vocabulary

This term I have been to and froing with inquiry ideas. After changing my inquiry focus completely, I finally came down to this question..

How can I support my learners to develop an interest in acquiring new vocabulary to accelerate their reading and writing?

After a lot of thought, I realised that I want vocabulary acquisition to be a focus this year because:

1: I have many learners who are reading at or above their age who need to expand their vocabulary in order to comprehend difficult texts

2: I have many very capable writers who needs to make their writing more creative

3: Teaching students how to add flavour to their writing has not been a strength of mine in past years and I want to get better at this.

4: I've had many instances this year when I've watched my class soak up new words like sponges... I forget how quickly children can take on new words!

Focus Group:

My focus group consists of 6 students who are all in my reading and writing class. They are all reading at 8.5 - 9 years of age which is above their reading age. The students in this group have already begun to show an interest in vocabulary acquisition through reading chapter books at home and eagerly discussing new words during reading discussion time. One of them in particular has been showing curiosity and asking 'what does that mean' every time he comes across an unknown word. I want to foster that eagerness that some of them already have!

How?

• Integrate reading, writing and inquiry
• Visuals eg:
  Interactive word walls, word wall for class read alouds, posters, childrens vocab work on walls
• Poetry
• Equal mix of non-fiction and fiction
• Personal word banks.. diary? Little notebook?
• Synonyms, similes, phrasing, adjectives
• Read alouds every day but with even more focus on the vocab and meaning

How will I track/see progress?

-I will compare the specific score of vocabulary in Term 1 - Term 4 Easttle writing tests

-Compare results in running records for the comprehension and vocabulary section from mid year to end of year tests

-Compare an independent narrative sample from beginning of year to end of year 

What has already been working well?

• Read alouds! I've made sure to do a whole class read aloud every day the past few weeks. When we've come across interesting vocabulary in the stories, I've written the words up on the board/a poster instead of just discussing it and moving on. I have actually seen some students use those new words from the book in their writing without being prompted to. What a great start!
• Visuals. I did a fun and creative synonym activity with the class. I printed their work and hung it up. The class has been excited to look at the hanging words and use them in their writing.

Inquiry focus: Getting the ideas flowing during writing

Inquiry focus 2022:

For the past couple months, I have been asking myself 
"how can I help children to come up with their ideas independently for writing?"

"how can I get children talking and ideas flowing easily?"

Focus group: 6 children
Writing at: early year 1 to early year 2.
I have identified a few key reasons why this group is struggling to write however decided to focus on just one: ideas.

The struggle with ideas:

-There has been a reliance on ideas coming from me for writing. I realised that I have been in the habit of feeding ideas to this group instead of finding ways for them to become confident at coming up with ideas themselves. 

-During small group time, when asked for their ideas I have often been met with silence. The children in my focus group have difficulty knowing where to start when sharing their ideas with others. 

-When writing independently, children in my focus group can write 1-2 sentences in a writing session. They find it very difficult to know what to write. 

-Retaining ideas: Students can say a couple of sentences out loud but struggle to retain the words in their head when going to actually write them down.

-Elaborating on ideas: there are a couple of children in this group who are able to come up with one to two ideas and can write several sentences however each sentence is the same idea repeated in a different way. 

What have I been doing to improve ideas in writing?

Group activities: Mixed ability groups working on a task together. Tasks have been hands on and have required groups to talk about ideas with each other and agree on ideas before writing them down. During group activities, the noise level in class is not expected to be quiet, it is a collaborative space and children are all free to talk about their ideas with each other. 

Voice typing: 

I haven't been a fan of voice typing in the past because children often come up with sentences that don't make sense. This is because they didn't check that voice typed words were actually what they said out loud. I have also found that voice typing doesn't encourage children to practice spelling.
However..
A couple of children in this focus group have recently been giving voice typing a go on their iPads and it turns out that these children have plenty of awesome ideas when talking out loud! 

Voice recording:

Record yourself on Explain Everything, listen back to the recording and write what you have recorded. This has helped for children who struggle to retain ideas whilst writing them down.

Getting children talking during class lessons: I've learnt to hold back from feeding my class all of the ideas. I realised this just encouraged children to rely on me for ideas and allowed them to zone out during a lesson. Instead, I've gotten into the habit of helping children to actively participate throughout a lesson by turning to their neighbour and sharing ideas.

Elaborating on ideas: We have done several group activities where each child in the group has been asked to come up with a different sentence about the same topic. Learning to elaborate on ideas with repeating ourselves.

A lightbulb moment for me...

I remembered that writing doesn't need to be a silent time all the time! I got into the habit of expecting writing time to be very quiet.. always. I've been working on making writing more fun and collaborative by creating opportunities for children to talk about ideas with each other and learn off each other during writing.

Fun Phonics

Fun with materials!

This term, we have been having fun with phonics by using hands on materials like modelling sand, magnet letters and lego blocks. 

As you can see in the video, my students have been learning their word families by clicking together the correct families with lego blocks. This has been for children reading in the red-green levels. It has been a fun activity for children to do independently but has also been a good tool during small group reading time. For example, if we have been learning the -ay word family, I would only pull the -ay words out of the basket and use them in that reading session. The children have enjoyed playing together and as you can hear in the video, they've been able to help each other while playing.

Another fun activity we have been doing is modelling sand word families. Children press magnet letters into the sand to create the word families of the day. 

**One thing I realised is that I need to be careful with which magnet letters I give children. As you can see in the video, I gave a child a capital Y, so when he wrote the words, he wrote saY, waY, daY etc. This was a good learning point as I can see that they are still learning about capital and lower case letters. 

Make it, write it, say it...

Children use their iPads to take photos of what they have made and then write the words several times.  When writing on an iPad, I have them write with a stylus so they can get practice physically forming the word. Muscle memory is important! Other days, I may have them write the words on a whiteboard or with chalk outside. Finally, they record themselves saying the words several times. After this, they can play with the word family blocks to support what they just learnt. 

Reading Inquiry: Making phonics fun!

At the beginning of this year, I noticed a common problem across my year 3 class:

Many students did not have the confidence or strategies to attempt to read or write new words. 

I spoke to Jocelyn, who teaches the other year 3 class at Pt England School. She noticed the same problem amongst a number of her students as well. Between our classes, we identified a group of 19 students (that sat between the reading levels of red to blue) who all had similar struggles:

-Lack of confidence to write initial letter sounds
-Lack of confidence/strategies to read initial letters sounds
-General letter confusion (unable to associate a letter with the sound that it makes)

As a result of these problems, many of the students in this target group struggled to write one-two sentences independently in their Easttle test. Five of the students in my target group wrote four or less words in their test because they didn't know how to give tricky words a go. As I worked more with them, I learnt that they were hesitant to make an attempt because they just didn't know where to start. During reading, this same group of students guessed words without looking at the initial letter sound. For example, one student read 'I can ride my car like this' when the word should have been bike instead of car. It was a common habit to gloss over words without attending to the first letter. Other times, they would reach a word, for example, we, but struggle to read it because they were not sure what the first letter sounded like. We identified that the most commonly misread letters were g, y, w, b, d and h because the letter name either doesn't match up with the sound that it makes, or the letters look similar.

So, here is the question we asked ourselves as we began our inquiry:

How can an integrated approach to reading and writing impact learners decoding and reading fluency?

Jocelyn and I have established repetitive daily tasks that our target group can do during reading and writing. We decided to be more intentional about the tasks that students do when they are not with the teacher. Instead of question-answer activities, we created tasks that meet their visual, audio and tactile learning needs. Students need to have the opportunities to 'read it, make it, write it, say it', as often as possible, so we decided to create a collection of hands on resources to share between our classes. These resources help students to build confidence in letter/sound knowledge, blends, sight words and word families. These include an assortment of fun letter sound games, blend games, sight word games, chalk, playdough, lego, moulding sand, magnet letters and iPad EE's that students can use with or without the teacher.

As seen in the video, we are also consistently making a connection between reading and writing through the use of our yellow alphabet cards and orange blends cards. We use these while reading books as well as during writing time.

After one term of being intentional about integrating reading and writing through fun tasks, we have already noticed a huge improvement in confidence in letter sound knowledge as well as blends knowledge. Students are really enjoying reading and writing time as there is now a wider, more engaging range of activities to do.

Please see below screenshots of some of my reading pages on our class site. 

DFI week 9 - Revision and reflection

This week was the final week of the Digital Fluency Intensive. I sat the Google Educator Level 1 exam and feel so proud of myself for doing it. We don't receive our results for a little while, however I'm not so worried about the result, as participating in the DFI course in itself taught me useful skills that I can use with my class. The exam had many scenarios that I needed to complete which required knowledge of all areas of the Google Suite - it made me realise how much more confident I am now with using all of the tools in Google Suite. 

Upon reflection of DFI, I am very happy about how confident I am at not only using the tools in Google Suite for teaching, but I am also now more aware of how to use G Suite the most effectively and efficiently for lesson planning and teaching lessons. I feel like I am able to be more creative with the way that I plan, present material and teach lessons since I have been given the time to be exposed to the ways that other teachers use G Suite. For example, I wasn't making us of Google Forms before because I wasn't aware of all of the different purposes it can serve as I didn't know about all of it's functions. I feel like I can be a bit more creative and use it as a tool in every day lessons like reading and maths - not just as a way to take surveys.

Something else that I liked about this course was the time that we were given to explore and to be exposed to other teachers' work. I liked having the time to explore other class sites and to watch Class OnAir episodes. There are always endless ways that we can be inspired by other teachers to improve our own creativity, but it's just having the time to see their work that is tricky! I appreciated having time set aside just to do that. I also appreciated being given the time to practice using the new skills that we learnt and having the support from our facilitators. Thank you Amie!

In light of lockdown..

I am proud of our year 3 class site and how easy it was for students to navigate it for home learning. I have my colleague Clarelle to thank for the way that it was set up and organised! We had a Google Meet with our students every school day for both lockdowns. There were times that we felt discouraged when holding the Meets as there were days that not many students showed up, however I am proud that we didn't give up.

The one thing that I regret about my teaching during lockdown is that I could have done more lessons that were topic or needs specific. There were a few days where I had a one on one Meet with a student and his parent when I got to listen to him read to me while I presented his book onscreen. It was awesome because we don't usually have that quiet, uninterrupted time in the classroom, so I'm glad I made use of that opportunity. I did a reading lesson with a small group of students that were all reading the same level on day as well. We had a good group discussion about the book and students took turns to read aloud for me through the Meet. I do wish that I made better use of the opportunity to listen to students read aloud and have group discussion about our stories. If we have another lockdown, I will organise times each day for levelled group reading and maths lessons. We have the digital technology to do this and I just need to make it happen!

Something that I will take forward into this new 'era' of teaching is rewindable learning. During the first lockdown, I created and shared maths videos each day that taught a certain strategy. Students were able to play these videos over and over at home while they completed their task. During DFI I was challenged to make my learning on the site more rewindable. I plan to share more videos on my learning pages so that students can have a better understanding of strategies and concepts whether they have been absent from school, late for a lesson or need to hear the same lesson again to understand it. I am looking forward to becoming more creative and efficient in the way that I use technology to teach!

DFI - Computational Thinking

 

The focus of DFI week 8 was computational thinking. We learnt about the new Digital Technologies Curriculum and the Manaiakalani principle of empowerment. My favourite part of week 8 was having the opportunity to explore different coding apps and sites that students can use. The websites/apps that I enjoyed learning about the most were Lightbot, the MineCraft Hour Of Code Tutorials and Scratch Junior.

I also enjoyed having the opportunity to look into a couple of teacher's Class OnAir sites to see how they have been teaching computational thinking with devices. I looked into my colleague Clarelle Carruthers' Class OnAir site and found it useful seeing how she has used Scratch Junior in class with students of the same age. It was also useful to watch her teach the class how to code using the Codey Robots as I would like to teach my class how to use these as well! 

 

Above are photos of my students beginning to learn how to use Scratch Jr as well as the Scratch Jr activities site that we have been following.

During DFI week 8, we were given the opportunity to choose a break out group based on the coding programme we were interested in learning more about. I chose to learn about Scratch Jr as I have wanted to use this in class however wasn't confident with it. We were introduced to the activities section on the Scratch Junior site, which not only helped me to learn how to use the basics of Scratch Jr, but were also so helpful to use in class with my students! Over the course of the week, I went through the activities with my class. Although many have had practice on Scratch before, it was a great way for them to learn a lot of functions they hadn't used before!

After going through several activities as a class, I planned a lesson for my students to create an animation of their own. I read them a story called Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road by Jim Dewar and Simon Williams. As a follow up activity, I asked them to choose to characters from the story and animate one part of the story. It was a lot of fun! I'm looking forward to getting creative and using Scratch for future follow up activities or as a fun whole class activity.

A tool that I learnt about from my fellow teacher Clarelle last week was the Classroom app for Apple. During DFI we have been learning many handy tips on Hapara (Teacher Dashboard) for example, how to view students work. I realised that not all functions on Hapara work the same on iPads as it does for Chromebooks - for example, viewing students current screens. I connected all of my students iPads to the Classroom app on my iPad  last week and it has been incredibly useful! I would highly recommend it to any teachers whose students are on iPads.