Numicon

The junior team is embarking on the Numicon maths teaching programme. It is an English system based around the manipulation and visualisation of shapes. I'm very interested in the results.

First part of 2017 Attestation by team leader Angela Donlon

Time:  9:40-10:30

Observation Notes:  Reading with the teacher, 1 group doing handwriting in books, 1 group doing clay modelling in the classroom and then other groups in shared space with teacher and activities as well.  Noise level working buzz, the teacher is able to focus solely on the reading group she is working with as the other groups are engaged and know what their job is.  Shared space has teacher at jelly bean table with a guided reading group, one group at table doing handwriting, and another group with blocks.  The shared space has a library area set up for quiet reading.  The working groups are all aware of their roles. 

Discussion Notes:  Matt Liley has moved into teaching this year level after many years teaching in senior school.  He has embraced this challenge with such positivity he has a very pleasant manner with the children.  Great questioning with guided reading group, building in vocab and allowing for time to answer, prediction and also he is feeding in new language, and reviewing CAPs in the group sessions.  During this observation all the children were very good at managing themselves with independent rotation activities, routines are set and well established this is vital as means the teacher is uninterrupted with instructional groups. Puzzles, Handwriting, Teacher.  Each teacher seems to have 3 reading groups each.  Transition times smooth and children are able to move to the next activity without prompting.  All children are assigned numbers for books so all systems are being followed.  Teacher proximal praise, good redirection of one child who was taking a little longer to move to next task, used redirection in positive tone and child responded immediately. 

William behaviour and learning

6 Year nets coming up Hannah,Aleigha,Tamati, Danica,James and Sienna concern as got 8 weeks to get these children to green.  (Summer effect) even though book sets, sight words and homework books and spoke to parents. May get to blue but not hit green. 

Oscar, Aamir, Ari,James,Issac, Alicia,Foster, Royce and William are close watch for behaviour

Significant number ESOL Gege, Cassandra, Aurora, Aamir,Emmie, Sienna as they speak Africans at home,

The teachers use the shared space so they can split for reading instruction, shared book, phonics, maths and writing.  This means management of noise and space is well organised.  The classroom is very organised all storage is labelled so all children can manage resources.  A large mat space is set up in the classroom for all whole class mat times and learning.   

Sharp Reading Professional Development

Sharp Reading Professional Development

At the beginning of Term 3 myself and Paulien Gray attended a workshop looking at the Sharp Reading programme. Both of us had been using some of their reading resources and really liked the content. The stories and articles were 'child-friendly' and levelled well for ability.
Sharp Reading is a very structured programme focusing on short intensive guided reading sessions with small groups. The Sharp Reading process is based around very systematic routines designed to give the students ample time and practice to embed good reading practices. The workshop day was very intensive and practical, with the goal of giving us the initial skills to introduce it at as soon as we got back to class. My initial thoughts were positive. I had been looking for more structure and direction in my reading programme and this appeared to give this in spades! The only misgivings I had were the time pressures it entailed and the extension of my more able readers.
I rearranged my reading groups so I had 5 groups of 6 rather than 4 groups of 8 and began at the beginning of Term 3.

Thoughts

• As expected I loved the structure of the programme. It made planning much simpler because I always knew what my next steps were.
• The majority of the children enjoyed it. This was especially the case with the less able readers. After discussion with them it appears that they liked knowing the structure of the lesson and what was going to happen. Because of it's repetitive nature they got better at the skills required and subsequently became more confident.
• The Sharp stories and articles I used were very engaging for the children and there is beginning to be a wide variety to choose from. 
• The idea of children verbalising  ITTM ( I think this means ...) after each sentence (or paragraph) was repetitive but you could really see the progress in how well the children were analysing and understanding what they were reading, as they were reading. 
• The expected timeframe was difficult to achieve. Often we got a bit side tracked and this led to a group missing out on their session occasionally.
• My more able readers became a bit bored with the repetitive process, however the use of ITTM still showed me that they did often lack fundamental understanding of what they were reading. 

Future

• If carrying on with Year 5/6 students I would definitely continue with the programme.  It would be interesting to see the progress after a full teaching year.
• I would look more closely at Stages 4 and 5 of the programme which deal with critical thinking, for my more able readers.
• As I am working with Year ones in 2017, I am very curious to see how the programme approaches decoding in its structure. This is covered in Stages 1 and 2. I will attempt to implement this during the year. 

Proportional Reasoning Professional Development

Attended a Proportional Reasoning PD session at Mokoia Intermediate on Tuesday. Ratios and proportions is probably the maths area I am least confident in teaching so i was looking forward to it. Unfortunately I was a bit underwhelmed. I was hoping for a systematic approach to teaching with lots of practical ideas. What we got was really just a range of problems to solve and a brief talk about each. It didn't help that the internet wasn't working but still disappointing.

Science Staff Meeting

On Wednesday I ran a staff meeting looking at the House of Science kits mentioned in an earlier post. I wanted to take the staff through a kit, looking and the types of activities it contained and the resources that came with it. The kit supplied for that week was 'Puzzle Box 2' which was good because it focussed on the Nature of Science strand. This is the least understood of the science strands so along with explaining the kit I took the opportunity to unpack the Nature of Science strand and offer a possible framework for investigation based around the science capabilities. The following is a quick presentation highlighting some of my points.




The meeting went really well. The staff were very interested and positive about the kits and we will look to see how we can incorporate them into next years programme. They also found my talk about the nature of Science strand enlightening and I received several positive comments.

Co-Constructing Success Criteria

Staff meeting on Wednesday about co-constructing success criteria. This is something I need to be doing more often. We analysed an article by Anne Davis - 'Using Samples to Co Constructing Criteria for Writing'. I really liked how she set out a framework for doing so. It was clear and structured which made it easy to understand and make sense. I will follow it when applicable.