Term 1, Week 10 - If Not Now, When?

Focus #1 - continue to work on the work-life balance
Focus #2 - grow my own passion for literacy
Focus #3 - grow my practice in numeracy
Focus #4 - building my practice in a traditional space

How’s this week been?

No gym sessions this week - energy levels were still not 100% after the weekend and I got into a routine of getting jobs done after school so will look to make up for this week over the upcoming holidays.  Great to notice that I actually missed exercise, so that is a bonus of not going this week!

I am still reading “The Invaders” by John Flanagan and enjoying it more as I read it.  The characters are being fleshed out more, particularly the supporting ones so I am glad I made the investment into the next two books in the series when I discovered them on sale a few years back.  Something that I am noticing though is how I need to put aside time for our class read-aloud as we are not making traction with the book and I do enjoy reading with the class.

We have selected our PLCs for next term to support our inquiry into numeracy.  I have chosen to join the group focusing on “using concrete materials to develop a rich understanding of mathematical concepts” as I feel this is what a number of my class require as we start to delve into new territories of numeracy next term and it will also build my confidence with how to properly utilise materials in my numeracy programme.  I am looking forward to having a shared focus on my inquiry as this is an aspect of teaching that I am missing from my previous experience at Stonefields.

We have had some great discussions in Room 13 this week about reflecting on the term that we have had and what we are looking forward to next term.  It has helped me identify who may still not be feeling part of the wider class and got me thinking about class culture over the holidays for anything that I can look to introduce in Term 2.

Teaching Highlights:
As mentioned above, we had a couple of great sessions this week on how we are finding life in the class and what things are missing from the kid’s perspective.  I did a bus stop activity where the kids had to respond to the following questions:

1. What have you enjoyed about Term One?
2. What have you found challenging about Term One?
3. What can we do differently in Term Two?

Without prompting, the kids got into the activity and I took the moment to stand back and observe.  At first, they were intent on adding their own responses on the sheets of paper, however, after around 10 minutes, I noticed that some of the kids started to talk to each other and ask each other questions about what they had put down on the paper.  This then turned into a whole class discussion and we made some goals that we wanted to achieve in Term 2.

Another thing that I was proud of the kids this week was that I decided that I wanted to grab a writing sample from them so I could assess over the holidays and plan based on what I found in these assessments.  These kids love to write, however, the writing sample prompts are never that fun so I discussed with them the day prior to them doing about why I was doing this and what could we get from doing this piece of writing.  Come Wednesday morning, I had 29 eager kids wanting to write about the life cycle of a monarch butterfly “because it would help me help them in their learning”.  Direct quote, no prompting needed.

Term 1, Week 9 - Feeling Fine?

Focus #1 - continue to work on the work-life balance
Focus #2 - grow my own passion for literacy
Focus #3 - grow my practice in numeracy
Focus #4 - building my practice in a traditional space

How’s this week been?

Only 1 gym session this week as I found myself getting a bit tired and run down.  This ended up with me taking Friday off to rest up.

The upside of being sick on Friday was that I was able to finish The Song of Achilles and have moved into the second book in the “Brotherband” series by John Flanagan.  I got into the Ranger Apprentice series a few years ago and ploughed through that so have started this series which I really enjoyed.  The backstory as to how John got into writing was something I found interesting where he started writing these stories as his son, at the time, was not interested in reading.  I have managed to hook 1 boy in my class onto the series so far as he was not enjoying Percy Jackson.

This week in numeracy I have been focusing on our Statistics strand as we near the end of the term.  I was also fortunate enough to have our Maths Lead come and model some number knowledge activities in class to a group of my focus learners as they move from Early Stage 5 (numbers up to 100) to become more confident with numbers past 100 leading into 1000 and 10,000.  As I have Learning Support in my class on alternate days, I will need to plan for this group of kids to have a boost of knowledge activities on those days.

I have also noticed that I am doing a lot more whole class teaching which is something that I need to look at for Term 2.  The majority of this term has been the build-up of our expectations and routines in Room 13 however it is slowly becoming the default for most of my literacy and numeracy teaching so now that I am getting a better understanding of the kids and what they are capable of, I should be starting to differentiate based on their needs.

Teaching Highlights:
Writing has been a highlight this week as we finish up our recounts of Garden To Table to send onto Anita at Stonefields for her learners to read and engage with.  Having this authentic audience has been really interesting as it has helped the kids focus on the following elements of their writing:

• The actual physical aspect of writing - as a class we chose to handwrite these pieces of writing as I noticed that when I said publish, the kids defaulted to thinking about typing their ‘good copy’ out and printing it.  
• The focus - while typically a rowdy class, when it comes to writing, Room 13 love quiet so we have made it a tradition to try and have as much quiet for around 15 minutes.  I have tried to implement the noise monitor on Class Dojo to help with this however the majority of the class seem to be able to manage themselves and are quick to let others know if they are not following suit.
• Feedback - we had a great session on Tuesday after I noticed I was starting to get the queues for conferencing (10 kids deep at one point!).  After some diagrams and discussion about them potentially only having a teacher edit and check their writing up until now, the kids were receptive to reading their writing to one another and I even had a few of the more confident writers start to critique and give feedback to each other.  This is very promising as I have also started to teach the class how to use both a dictionary and thesaurus in their literacy sessions so I will continue to grow this capacity as we move into Term 2.
• The level of detail - from my initial assessments, I noticed that the majority of the class were confident with simple recounts, however, these lacked detail.  Due to our prompt of writing recounts for another school who did not have similar experiences to ourselves, the kids really thought about how they could portray their messages.  This led them to use more adjectives, a range of different sentence types and a lot of them injecting their own voice into their writing.