Orientation 2023

The January Orientation was completed through a tag team effort this year. Phil led, preparing the slides, while I added tidbits, ideas, and thoughts as they arose. It was a great experience, serving as preparation before taking the lead starting in April, where I conducted the orientation again due to staff changes.

 

My biggest takeaway from participating in the orientation was to ensure a thorough understanding of the speaker notes. Additionally, it is crucial to ensure that the slides are relevant, showcasing the latest events and learning opportunities within the Ako Hiko Clusters.

The second part of the day focused on in-class facilitation. I found this set of slides important, as the teachers with whom Phil and I will be working need to understand the different roles.

The afternoon session focused on creating a class site, and I'm glad there were two of us available to assist the teachers and address their questions. One key takeaway is to remember to duplicate a site you've created to start the following year if you're satisfied with your previous work. This link can then be shared with students, enabling them to access their learning materials quickly. If you make changes each term, it can become confusing for students to locate the information they need.

Building Relationship

More and more teachers are discussing the importance of developing relationships with students and involving whanau (extended family) to ensure everyone is on the same page. This approach is well established in some countries where teachers have the same class for multiple years.

Ten years ago, I had the opportunity, more out of necessity than design, to teach a range of year levels. I started by teaching Year 1 and 2 students in a school. The year following, they needed a teacher for a Year 2/3 class, so I moved up a level and continued teaching the same students. The year after that, I taught a Year 4 class, and eventually, I became the Senior Teacher for Years 5 and 6. As a result, I had the privilege of teaching half of the students for multiple years.

Each year, I would begin by calling the parents to discuss how their children were settling into school after the break and to address any concerns they might have had. As I had taught some of these students for 3 or 4 years, parents were more comfortable engaging with me and discussing their concerns. However, it took time to establish these connections.

More recently, I moved to a different area and level of teaching. To build relationships with the parents and students I was now responsible for, I started by calling them to introduce myself before engaging in more challenging conversations. Unfortunately, this was the same year that we faced the challenges of COVID-19, and students rarely attended school on a regular schedule. This made it more difficult to establish connections with students and their whanau.

As a school, we read 'When the Adults Change, Everything Changes' check out my posts to see what changes I make as a teacher and mentor.

 

Words - Can you make them make sense in Maths?

What do we know from reading that we can apply to maths?

• We can find the key ideas or information (What we already know after reading the question)
• We can find out what we need to know!

In this particular lesson, students are being shown how to use a tree diagram to organise the choices or options available from the question.

Click on the image to go to Class onAir.

Squares Squares and more Squares

What is a square to you? Have you ever really looked at squared numbers?

I was once teaching students about multiplication using grid paper. We create 2x8, 3x8 and many more to help students understand their times' tables with a display. When we realised the 2x2, 3x3 and 4x4 (yes, I did know they were called squared numbers), students kept coming and saying, 'this one is a square'. And I knew I had to use this student-created realisation and build on it for them. 

Teaching Year 7 and 8 students who again know about squares but didn't know about the 'power of' was an opportunity to bring this back to life. Especially when we also had to look into square roots, the opposite of squares.

Click on the Image to go to the Class onAir lesson.

 

What the Point?

When we write, there are different perspectives the author can take on or use. 

The most common is the first person, where we are right there in the story. Words such as; We, us, our, and ourselves are first-person pronouns. Singular first-person pronouns include I, me, my, mine and myself. This gives the feeling of being inclusive, making the reader feels part of the story.

We have the second person where the word you is used frequently, almost like it was all about them or their fault. Again the author is very involved, but they may understand the background behind the issue yet.

Third person perspective is one of my favourites when writing. The author is writing as if looking through a window or door and watching what is happening. It helps to use your imagination and create pondering thoughts about what they could be thinking or what might happen next.

Justifying my Answers

Students are learning how a different point of view changes a story. They were asked to evaluate evidence to help justify their thinking. This needed to be more detailed than just having I, me or he and she in it. It needed to be in sentences from the story.

The students got this concept and were able to give examples. Next, I would like to see it in a more challenging text with speech, as this is written in the first person even if the story is not.

Ako Hiko LCS Hui

 Celebrating How Far Have We Come

With Phil moving on, we looked at what the Cluster has been doing and achieved over the last 3 years.

We started by giving ourselves a superhero. I gave myself courage. Then we gave one to a colleague. Which would you pick for yourself?

Insights in the Staffroom - Sharing the Light in the Dark

There are many things Ako Hiko Cluster, do that my previous Cluster doesn't, and many that the Manaiakalani Cluster do.

I found this activity interesting as I look to take over the Facilitator Role, what will change in 3-5 years when I think about my next step?

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.