Reflecting on the success of your inquiry and next steps Term 4

My Inquiry Question:

Will having a Strucutred Literacy focus in Instructional Reading , handwrtitng and Writing time help assist our learners with high learning

needs show growth in attitiude, engagment, and data results

Final assessment has been done for the year. 

Although I am not especially caught up in Assessment as such it has

been fantastic to see percentage shifts in Reading Accuracy and in Retell when I reviewed my Reading data. 

A big group of tamariki made substantial gains within Reading and are really flying through the spelling

patterns and heart words/fast words. Their oral language and abilty to encode and decode is astounding. I am

so incredibly proud to say these children can read and should sustain their reading skills as they are embedded.

Out of 22 children  (I do not count ORS Student and one student refused to be assessed) all moved in someway

within Reading assessment. The top 6 student (our highest of needs) also succeeded. Their ability to Decode and

Encode still needs a huge amount of teacher support in 2024 however they have the grounding know to work on.

The remaining 17 have moved to Set 4,Set 5 OR off the Sunshine Decodables into Turquoise/ JJ. Please note

though that these children have also had amazing support through RR. For HERO clean data I did have to

undertake CW running records. This can me another view of where children are sitting against National

norms or data collection.

Reading Results

I had a (another) great discussion with RtLit the other day after she came in to test. We were discussing my

class and where to for next year- in discussions around continuing SL for these learners. She was also

studying to improve her pedagogy and she said she has just learnt that ..."At Year 3 a child's visual memory is

full. They can not take any more as their capacity is full" . This made both of us stop and think about a

particular year 4 boy who cannot seem to retain even though he is on SL and under Rlit/ Sl is so structured

and it breaks everything down... what hit for us is if he returned to Colour wheel then we don't think he will

succeed as his memory is full. We can only work with bite size chunks (or phonemes :-) )

In class I am thinking of this and design more activities around sound swaps and decoding/ encoding words

as the children are working through their sounds packs well.

                                                    RTD teacher has praised me on and taken copies of my teaching

and learning structure to use with his other students in Taranaki- Very humbling!

I knew I needeed to place more emphasis on the comprehension side of learning as I feel that was lost in

Week 6,7,8 with testing Term 3 and then end of term antics.

This are current slides of how I am providing Comprehension learning with my students during Instructional Reading

Writing- I need to get back into the swing of the self driven formative (fast feedback). This was great being used in the

back of books however the children loved being able to checkin with their Ipads also. This made it a bit fun but linked

to our Whanau also. Sadly the uptake again wasnt great- I get much better responses with actaully sending books home.

We have introduced a challenge for our class ...2 page barrier!! So for those who are ready we EXPECT them to reach the 2 page

barrier EVERYDAY! This is SO SO exciting for them at the moment. They are loving the challenge and it is

fostering that knuckle down, I can do it, go me attitude that we NEED to see in our children at this stage.

We are also completely including our top 6 (very high needs students) in this they reach the one sentence stage.

Loved our most recent Writing blog…so many children are writing FAST and their pages are FILLED with

tries and attempt and very careful thoughtful spelling- not the made up guesses that we were getting in Term 1. I will contune to use Dr Helen Walls new resource as I feel it is very structured and also allows for small steps for

childrens own knowledge and understanding of improving their writing.

Handwriting is going very well and we are very pleased about neatness and speed- so have placed emphasis 

on this being transferred into writing time and reading with S,G,G as you can see with my Reading resources.

I creatednew HW books as well as always have ready laminated SGG for students to use on a word that they may needsupport with during that time so a shared approach allowing for practice and praise through teacher scaffolding/ modelling.

    

                                                    Love our HIGH QUALITY WORK table

Ending the year is a special time where we have to look back and honestly say "Did I affect change? Did my learners embed new skills and will these skills go with them?" I really feel that by using a Strucutred approached in all three areas of Reading Writing and HW my students have made significant progress to being a confident learner who can work independanlty at tasks as well as understand the importance self assessment and feedback. It was hard at first completely change the mahi I had done in 2022 working with Yolanda very closely- however this did put me in a good frame of mind to try and find connections with new programmes that would cover the 3 areas needing a boost for my learners. I do still use her amazing resources and connect that to my new learning. I was proud that I didnt fall into the trap of that phoincs is everything in Decodables teaching and that other areas of school mahi will fall behind- i just found ways to improve or adapt my teaching so I know I was hitting those targets but was still covering everything expected in my daily rountine. I am proud of my students but have been blessed with amazing support from my TA as well as other professionals such as RtLit, RTD and RTLB who all have said my programme and teaching development has created a very positive shift for children who were finding Literacy unacheiveable- or maybe just hadn't even been shown the right ropes to climb - when they came through the doors in Term 1.