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.

First Aid Refresher

This week we had a St Johns medic speak to the staff about first aid in a school environment. It was the best session we have had of its type. He was great at focussing on the issues we are most likely to face in our playground. He was also able to impart his advice in a way which made it understandable and not beyond our capabilities. I think this means that the advice will be more easily remembered.

NZEI Award Ratification Meeting

As the NZEI rep for Otonga it was important for me to attend the meeting to vote on ratifying the new award. Despite my 'encouragement' I was disappointed that only one other staff member from school attended. I don't consider myself a strong union person but I think attending one or two meetings a year isn't too much to ask. Talking to colleagues at school and listening to people speak at the meeting, there seems to be quite a bit of disillusionment with the union and the award they have negotiated.