Kim Sowman Professional Growth Cycle 2024

  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...

 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...