Monday 19 February 2024

2024 and a focus on Reading

 I am back to work after a year on maternity leave with my beautiful twin girls, and I am looking forward to a change of pace, stepping back from my Team Leader role and focussing more on the learners in front of me in my own class. 

 I have spoken to the leadership team in my school about where our needs are, and I am keen to inquire into the reading needs of my learners this year. It is only 3 weeks into the term and already I am excited by the opportunity to increase discussion, engagement and comprehension of reading texts from within my class. 

Language is the key to all learning. Without language we can't think, formulate and hypothesise. I feel this is the best lens through which to increase student achievement by 1.5 years across all three Rs - which is a cluster goal for 2024.

The focus for Term 1 is Identifying and profiling (no solutions yet). 

* Identifying - valued learning outcomes which include but are not limited to achievement outcomes.

* Profiling -  Investigate the nature of the students’ strengths and gaps in relation to valued learning outcomes in detail.

I am going to take this term to gather the data and observations necessary to inform my Inquiry question for 2024. Watch this space!


Sunday 20 March 2022

2022 Inquiry: What is my question?


In our staff meeting today, we talked about the challenges we are facing in our current learning environment, as well as the goals we have for our learners' futures.

We found there was a clear theme of 'connectedness' emerging as our direction in 2022. 

This leads me to a question: 

How can I build and encourage relationships in my class? 

This question encompasses peer to peer friendships, class working-relationships and a sense of belonging within the wider school community.

Hopefully by focussing on building a strong foundation of relationships within the class, learning habits and task completion, (culminating in achievement progress,) will naturally occur.

Sunday 8 August 2021

Update on my Inquiry...

I have met with my group today and discussed how my Inquiry is going for this point in the year. 


I found Term 2 a very distracting term that did not allow me as much of a chance to focus on my Maths programme as I would have liked, due to having a Student Teacher in for five weeks (I wanted to keep things consistent for her sake and didn’t change things up too much). I also had the distraction of being asked to contribute my ideas and thoughts to the new Sunshine Decodables programme, that was in the process of being put online. - This culminated in me going into the Sunshine offices in the last school holidays to record some videos of how I have been using this programme in my own classroom practice. You can view these here.


Back to my original goal of improving my Maths teaching and the children’s learning, I am excited by some changes I have recently implemented in my programme. Trying to motivate the children to stay on task, I have discovered some very useful and engaging resources as part of the Teacher Support Material, available through MathSeeds (which I trialled through my Reading Eggs membership). These are aligning nicely with my teacher-led lessons from the NZC books we are using in our school. 


I have seen some pleasing improvement (which I largely put down to our regular use of XtraMath in the classroom) in mid-year testing with many Stage 2-3 students achieving Stage 4 in Additive Thinking in their JAM tests. 


This leads to where  I am focussing for the second half of the year - improving knowledge and ability in Multiplicative Thinking and Fractions. I look forward to working closely with my colleague Sonali Carter, to plan and implement engaging lessons that achieve measurable shift in these areas. 


Sunday 21 March 2021

My Professional Teaching Inquiry for 2021!

As stated in my final blog post of 2020, I am keen to focus on my Maths programme in 2021. 

My focus question is: How can I use purposeful teaching of mathematical language to raise the achievement of my learners in Mathematics? 

I am interested in how best to incorporate the professional learning we have had in Mathematics through the DMiC PLD over the last two years, with the more prescriptive approach through using the NZC Mathematics Books as a resource throughout the school this year. I would like to try to balance the two approaches, so as to ensure full and appropriate curriculum coverage while still giving children the rich discussion and problem solving approach. 

Looking at my Y3s PAT results, we can see our Y2s from 2020 did not retain enough number knowledge, particularly in place value and basic facts. Applying this knowledge to word problems and understanding the language used is also another big problem. I am mindful of mixing up my use of mathematical terms to ensure understanding of all terms that the children may come across. Eg. spelling out that the total number means to count all. I also think ‘language’ can incorporate visuals / resources that children need to be familiar with (eg. place value blocks) and will be mindful of using an appropriate variety throughout the course of the year. 

Working with Sonali Carter we are going to try planning together, using the NZC books as well as our own experience to push number knowledge retention, basic facts and teach our children explicitly how to apply this knowledge in various word problem situations. 

 I am going to investigate both the physical NZCM texts to understand how they break down the Mathematics Curriculum at my level, as well as the online resource material provided. I am going to rewrite appropriate problems to encourage discussion and authentic understanding with my own students. 

 I am using XtraMaths for the first time with my class this year. I am finding this a great way to encourage the knowledge base growth that is needed by my students to begin to tackle word problems with more understanding. 

 I am stepping my class through learning progressions more deliberately than I have before to ensure there is a good coverage of the basics - such as making 5, 10, doubles, halves and families of facts.

Friday 4 December 2020

End of Year Reflection - 2020. What a year it's been!

 Well, on top of everything else, I dislocated my knee almost as soon as we got back to school again, and was pretty much off for the remainder of Term 3! 

Term 4 has been crazy busy with testing, reports and art exhibitions, so I am finally finding the time to look back on how this year has gone.

I am so pleased with the progress that our children have made in Reading across the team this year! Despite a year of many challenges, we were not disappointed by any of our Reading results, in fact we had quite a few children whose results pleasantly surprised us! 

Looking forward to 2021, I can see that my team could benefit from some professional development around knowing when to progress students further, as we had a few children reading in their instructional groups at too low a level. Mrs Wilson noticed, some of these children only required a little more wait time from the teacher in order to show they knew or could work out the word in the text.

Here is an update showing the progress made by my target students in the second half of this very challenging year. I couldn't be more proud of them!

Inquiry Group
NameEOY 2019 Reading LevelCurrent Instructional LevelEnd of Year Testing Result!
H91422
P111418
T101418
M71416
E101419
K121420

Maybe next year I will be able to Inquire more into my Maths programme as I had originally intended to do this year!

Sunday 1 November 2020

Reflections on Distance Teaching and Learning

 We had our Manaiakalani Staff Meeting with Dorothy Burt today. We were asked to reflect on how we incorporated Learn-Create-Share in our distance teaching.

Heidi Davis and I came up with the following thoughts:

Friday 28 August 2020

Distance Learning Again!

 I thought it might be worth a short blog post to share how we've attempted to best teach Reading, trying to maintain some progress for our students in a distanced learning / 'Bubble School' world.

Here are some resources that my team has put together: