Reflecting Reading

A tricky skill for everyone is to reflect on what they have read. I read a lot for enjoyment and to escape, but I have never honestly reflected on the novels I read. Except to say I wish I could be more like that or they are so lucky, I hope to find a Happy Ever After or HEA. 

So how do we get students to reflect on what they have read and learnt from the particular reading they have been given?

Check out my Class onAir - Where we talk about the changes characters go through during a story and how that affects the novel and the events that change the characters.

Mixing Up Guided Reading

How can we be creative with Guided Reading?
How can we help students synthesise information from more than one text?

Sam Hunt's Poem - School Policy on Stickmen - read the poem and draw what it tells you using orange and brown. In small groups discuss why they may have banned stick figures.

Unpacking the poem -

Who might have banned stick figures and why?

Why the exclamation mark?

And yet ... suggests that Sam Hunt doesn't think much of this policy. What words does he use to show a positive image of the picture?

What about Sam Hunt's description of colour?

Introduce terms: Subversion: Sub - under, version to turn about

Complementary Text - Comic Man

Highlight any parts which you think have similar ideas to School Policy on Stickmen.

How could we show these similarities in a table?

Comic Man  (Dylan Horrocks)                  Similarities                             Stickmen

 Cartoon                                                         proper images, books                            Stick images

                                                                      frowned upon, but do it

                                                                     drawing from a young age

                                                                   every possible school project

                                                             determination, positive, happy place 

Year 7 and 8 Students should be developing their own framework/templates/graphic organisers - ways to present their work. Make sure they have been exposed to them and had them explained the purpose

• Compare and Contrast Chart - Two columns of similarities and differences using bullet points.
• Single List using bullet points
• List the descriptive words, phrases

Comparing Character

This Term's challenge was to investigate a Character in a Novel. Students choose from a range of Novels, and they picked;

Hatchet - is about a boy trying to survive in the Wilderness after the small plane he was in crashed. 

Refugee - is about 3 young people from different countries and time periods, fighting to stay alive and find their way to a safe place to make a new life for themselves and their families.

Counting 7's - is about a young girl with autism who loses her adopted family and her growth to finding stability in a new family.

This Class on Air Lesson shows the discussion I have with students about how Brian from Hatchet grows from a boy who knows nothing about survival in the Canadian Wilderness to surviving. 

Digital Art

 Last Year I came across a digital Siapo and with Tongan Language Week I thought a focus on Art would be a neat way to celebrate the Week. here is my Class on Air Video showing how this can be done.

Check out the student work in the slides! I am very proud of what my students achieved it is also visible on the wall outside our class for all to see.

Finding Angles

 I have enjoyed setting out to find new ways to inspire students in Maths. After seeing tape and student writing on tables, I want to have a go in my class. Using Masking tape I taped a range of angles across the student tables (grateful I teach math first thing in the morning). They were all very intrigued to find out what we would be learning about that week.

Check out my Class on Air Lesson to find out more. 

A quick summary, students investigated complementary angles, how angles around a point add up to 360 and could make their own assessments and justify their thinking.

Inferring Mood in Reading

 Through a research programme with Manaiakalani Year 7 and 8 classes, I am developing my understanding of teaching critical literacy skills for reading that can be used in writing. In this episode of Class OnAir, I am looking at how students can identify the mood in a story through inferring. As adults, we know we use clues from images, words and how people and situations are portrayed to us.

Just before this lesson, I was teaching students how to identify mood in their reading, using nouns and verbs to make connections. I was reminded this is called inference. When I mentioned inferring and guessing using keywords from the text, the light bulbs exploded. Check out the link to Inferring the Mood through Class onAir.

Sketching Koru Patterns to Pastel Koru Patterns

These 2 episodes for Class OnAir are a  series. Not something I usually do, but when I figured out both steps are vital for the piece of Art I wanted to share onAir. 

Even Year 7 and  8 students need time to practise and design. So that is the first episode encouraging students to practise. We don't get better at riding a bike by giving up. The same goes for all aspects of life, including art. So to get our best koru patterns, everyone had to practise.

The second episode is taking our design to the finished product. Some spectacular pieces made a great display for our community evening. In this episode, the students used a 'cool' colour starting with the dark shade, e.g. dark green, to outline their design (which is in a 2D shape that makes the border) and then the light shade to colour inside. Students were encouraged to overlap, have a piece missing from the border and if possible have relief or black koru (that worked its way into the colour pattern).

Enrich Math - Capacity

 Popcorn Capacity

What a great way to start a maths lesson. The students talked about capacity and predicted, guessing which container would hold more. They got to make the containers to verify their thinking. The best part according to the students was when I brought out the POPCORN! Check out this episode of Class onAir to see what happened.

What I like about using these tasks is I can engage a range of students with maths and then teach them the relevant skills they need to move to the next step, such as using formulas to work out the capacity on a container.

Create - Staff Meeting

We joined Wesley Primary and May Road School to investigate the Create part of the Manaiakalani Pedagogy LEARN CREATE SHARE. 

I found this session informative and something I could take back to class and use. As we are constantly trying to get student to create their own way of sharing their learning, but are focussed on the get it done. This chart gives students and teachers alike the chance to pick how they present their learning.

Many of these activities student can do, and we can always give them the links and mini lessons to work out how to create it. 

As we had been doing mood in class I tried the incredibox, I do remember looking at this once before but could figure it out. Today I did it. 

I can't wait to encourage students to create a piece of writing and then setting the mood with incredibox.

Hapara Champ - Student Dashboard

 Welcome back,

Student Dashboard is our focus this week with Hapara Champions, something I have never used before, so for me, there was lots of learning and adjusting to make it work for me and my students.

It is a platform to share tasks, resources, expectations and more with students. Similar to how I share learning through my class site.  The one huge advantage I can see is that students can modify and adjust work before clicking submit. Once submitted or a task is closed off they can no longer submit their work, but they know it is handed in to be marked. Giving them a sense of accomplishment. 

The menu of the left again helps students find the tasks they need to start and do to the files link that shows students tasks they have started and need to finish.

PB4L - Following Up

 Giving Feedback, Feedforward and FeedUp

Circle Time - Setting aside a time daily, weekly to check in with students

SHARE

• Something positive/fun from your weekend, the learning today
• Something you found challenging

Working up to -

• Safe place where students can share problems, issues they would like help with.

To help develop PB4L we need to give students feed to improve learning and behaviour. We can feed them with food about how they did with their behaviour, what hey can do better and how we can help them.

When modelling for students ensure there is an example for students to refer back too. (Although this is something I usually do, we are in the process of moving and the class tv had been moved, so didn't have this option. But I didn't even use paper duh.

Hapara Champ - Workspace

This is a new feature in Hapara for me. It was an interesting learning curve. But once I got the basics it seemed easy. 

It is set up like a task board and you can create 4 heading 

e.g. 1. Learning Intentions

2. Readings

3. Tasks, To Do

4. Expectations Rubric

The menu of the left indicate where the workspace comes from, just like other google apps. Owned by me, shared with me, My labels and the last one is for your professional learning. The last one is where you go to do the Hapara Course.

The more I use it the easier it seems to get.

Running a Training Course

 When sharing with staff, or other teachers there are many ways to support them. Here are a few.

PLD can be done in so many ways we often forget about the inconsequential meetings and quick tips we pass on. They all count. This year we had an acting principal for a term before our new principal started and both had questions that needed answering even though they are on very different ends of the digital fluency scale. 

There is no one size fits all, and now I go in prepared to help the person take notes checking over them ( as the order could be very different and then they give up, don't ask for help as they believe you didn't tell them. if they don't need the notes version all good.

Even seasoned professionals need reminders now and again. I often hear what do you mean I can unsend...

Talk Moves -

After using rich maths activities and starting the talk, now we need to learn to dig deeper and get students to say what they see. As 

Having looked at a couple of my Class OnAir Videos, I realise that the more talk the students do the more they learn. So to me this is very important part of the lesson.

This is an important idea to grasp, as we want students to learn and remember new concepts so we need to give them opportunities to discuss, experience and teach others.

To Help Students with discussions here are some easy phrases to encourage more talk include:

• "What else?"
• "Tell me more..."
• "And.."

I look forward to working out more phrases to encourage discussion and to encourage to student to think deeper.

Although this was brought to my attention again through Math PD it is true in all areas of learning.

Blogging for Students

 Malo le lei

This week my focus for Class on Air was getting students to share their learning on their new blog in Edublog. Although this was done earlier in the term we revisited it due to students returning after covid isolation periods. Click on the images to learn more.

We talked about the purpose of sharing our work, who wants to see it and why.