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Reflecting 2024

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  Reflecting on the success of your inquiry and what next steps you need to take to continue is the last essential step in our PGC Inquiry Cycle. Reflecting on what you changed in your practice and if you felt it was successful or not is essential. Detailing your self-change and aligning this with what your students achieved due to this is important to the reflection process. Overall reflection of the inquiry leads into the next steps you should take to continue to grow your practice which can then help you frame what has happened also. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2024 was a tough year with some real challenges with learning and behaviour due to the make up of the class. Two neurodiverse students (learning and behaviour challenges) plus a number of students who require significant support to be able to attempt and/or complete their work presented some daily challenges. Two children...
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Peer observations Term 3 2024

  PGC Observation Term 3 2024 I need help making the form fit on this page so please follow the link for now.
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Supporting blog from Dr Helen Walls

  Dr Helen Walls, The Writing Teacher, explains why we should move away from constructivism and towards explicit teaching. https://www.essentialresources.co.nz Key takeaways: The explicit teaching of writing skills is essential. We must show children how to form letters, how to segment words, and how to write in sentences. We do handwriting daily. This is still a struggle for some but being explicit and teaching letter groups has made a difference. BSLA phonics being tranfered to our writing programme has been a game changer. Knowledge must be explicitly taught too. Here, I refer to literacy-related knowledge (such as knowledge of spelling patterns and text structures) but also conceptual and vocabulary knowledge across all subject areas Again BSLA has been a great resource and using the scope and sequence has been useful. We must remember that vocabulary knowledge is the strongest predictor of reading comprehension by Year 8 The BSLA vocab enriching texts have been valuable. The h...
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How is it going? September 2024

 What  progress is being made in our written language programme? What challenges are there to over come? What can we do? The biggest challenge at the moment is the diversity in the learners. I have some children ready fly in terms of writing and are doing so. They can take onboard the individual goals set and work towards them. I have some children ready to fly but held back by their handwriting. I have some children plodding along with encouragement and I have some that are still unable to write any words independently. Some children see it as a chore and resist writing. There is a large continuum in terms of children's desire to learn and improve. 25 children is a lot for a junior class and with so many big personalities and challenging behaviours some days it is hard to get traction. Attendance is an issue for some. I need to do all literacy prior to lunch as I have no TA Monday, Wednesday or Friday in the afternoons. Our class has 2x 40 minutes of TA support in the af...
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BSLA Reading and Writing and using AI

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   Action Planning and Testing Ideas is where you plot out a plan of what will happen when and how this could look. Setting up a plan and testing some of your ideas before you implement the plan allows you as the teacher to branch out and try things that you might be unsure of. This also allows you to be more critical when reflecting on what you feel will serve you well in this inquiry. Testing ideas is something that can continue through the entire inquiry and is only placed within this section of the inquiry cycle as a starting place. Googling images has been working well however now that we have moved from cvc and cvcc it has been getting harder to find what I wanted. A post on NZ Teachers Facebook page about AI images sent me down a very fun rabbit hole of designing my own images to suit exactly what I want to teach. eg Spilt diagraphs in this instance cake, kite. At the same time I am modelling adding a conjunction ( because) , y when it is the e sound eg happy, adding i...
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Evolving the BSLA and writing relationship.

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  Action Planning and Testing Ideas is where you plot out a plan of what will happen when and how this could look. Setting up a plan and testing some of your ideas before you implement the plan allows you as the teacher to branch out and try things that you might be unsure of. This also allows you to be more critical when reflecting on what you feel will serve you well in this inquiry. Testing ideas is something that can continue through the entire inquiry and is only placed within this section of the inquiry cycle as a starting place. Although using the vocab elaboration books was working well it became a struggle to make it work with all the great books available so I switched to finding google images to support what I was wanting to teach. We have stuck with colourful semantics but adding in conjuctions as well as many of the writers are ready for it. I have introduced and explicitly taught high ultility words such as went and with. Many of the children can now sit down and wri...
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BSLA Reading and writing

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  Action Planning and Testing Ideas is where you plot out a plan of what will happen when and how this could look. Setting up a plan and testing some of your ideas before you implement the plan allows you as the teacher to branch out and try things that you might be unsure of. This also allows you to be more critical when reflecting on what you feel will serve you well in this inquiry. Testing ideas is something that can continue through the entire inquiry and is only placed within this section of the inquiry cycle as a starting place. Continuing on with using BSLA Vocab enhancing books. This is working well. We are gifting children the words we would not expect them to know but really focusing on cvc/cvvc words that they can encode. Then depending on the individual we add in some extras eg ing We are still using colourful semantics as our structure. Who, is doing what, where plus encouraging writers to add more if they can.
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