Distance Learning: Friday Spelling Test

One of the things that we are trying to do for our students is keep things as normal as possible but from home. On a normal Friday, we have a schoolwide assembly and generally after we have a Teamwide spelling test that is administered over the PA system by our amazing office staff.

So, today we decided it would be fun to have our own Distance Learning team assembly complete with karakia, mihi and waiata as we would any other day of the school term. It was great to see so many students hop on and join us this morning, especially since it was at 9am! 

NOTE: Names have been blocked out because it is not Cybersmart to post last names online!

It was fun seeing some faces that I don't see in my general literacy and maths classes as we spent about 30 minutes together. Mrs. Flavelle from our office staff joined us and administered our spelling test. The students completed the test using a Google Form, which allowed their answers to be submitted right away. As always, the students with a perfect score will be entered into a drawing to win a special treat once we are back at school.

GOOGLE MEET TIP: 

We are learning as we go along, and one of the coolest things we have learnt is to download the Chrome Extension "Google Meet Grid View" This is a great tool when you are meeting with more than 4 students so that you are able to see everyone in one view. 

Distance Team Meetings

That's right! We are also meeting together as the team of teachers from our intermediate block using Google Meet. It is important that we keep in contact with each other in order to continually make what we are doing better and to ensure the our own well-being is looked after.

We are our own community of learners as we branch out into this new way of teaching for us, and we are our best supporters. Especially, as we are now learning not only how to run a distance learning classroom with intermediate students but how to do it from home while juggling our own families and flat mates who are also all home and wanting our attention.

As we branch into our new normal, I am so thankful to be doing it with the lovely ladies of Team 5 at PES. 

Online Distance Teaching - Covid 19

The past few weeks the world has seen dramatic change in our everyday lives. As a result of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, the teachers on Team 5 at Pt. England School spent time speculating about what it would look like if we had to teach our students from home. We then spent many hours planning, and developing what we felt would be the best way to do this while keeping in mind the daily structure and routine that our students are already accustomed to.

After receiving some advice and tips from our Manaiakalani support near the end of Week 7, we thought we had a plan to run with. We decided to change our regular team site to our distance learning plan for Week 8 so that students would be used to seeing it and working from it. We were waiting for the go ahead to introduce our students to Google Meet/Hangouts, that we thought would come after our school wide staff meeting scheduled for Monday after school before demonstrating for students what distance learning would look like the next morning (Tuesday of Week 8).

Our first Google Meet on 24/3/20 at 9am

Little did we know, life in New Zealand was about to be drastically changed after a news conference that began halfway through our lunch hour on Monday afternoon. It was announced that our nation was moving to a level 3 for 48 hours before a final isolation lock down of Level 4 for four weeks. This meant that we were no longer going to have the chance for a run through of Google Hangouts/Meet with our students before they were at home.

Our students were sent home Tuesday with a newsletter stating that school would be closed to students for the next four weeks and to staff after Wednesday. We now had 48 hours to ensure that all students had what they needed to continue learning from home.

It also meant that at 9am Tuesday morning the six teachers of Team 5 went live with our students using Google Meet.  We decided that this week would just consist of checking in with our kids twice a day checking that they were well, answering any assignment related questions, and ensuring that they understood the importance of staying at home. We are also keeping in contact with our students using Hapara Dashboard to comment on student's work and blog posts, as well as answering student questions through email.

A Look to the End of 2020

As a team, the year 7/8 teachers spent some time before we started our whole school PD days thinking about what we would like our students to leave our classrooms like at the end of 2020. As part of this activity, we spent a few minutes reflecting on the 2019 school year before pairing up to create our own "Gingerbread Man" labeled diagram. Here are the pictures we came up with.

After completing, our student task we spent a few minutes talking about what this would require from us as teachers to get students to the point that they have achieved these things. 

PES PD: Dr. Jannie van Hees

As a team, we have presented Jannie with three areas of concern

FOCUS: Reading age: 8-10 years old. This is where a lot of our kids are stuck..
Reading strategies/ approach to do with kids when they are with us.
How do we lead group discussion/facilitate our reading groups to get more vocab and thinking/argumentation from our students?
Also what types of follow up activities can they do after this session with the teacher?

Deep Diving into Text

Narratives are often less demanding in terms of what is going on in the text. We need to make sure we are doing a disproportionate amount of non-fiction.
Read silently-take in information (what can we get a hold of from this text? Then, read to build fluency)
Re-read aloud 1-2 paragraphs (or short section) and try to get a wider deeper meaning of the reading (holistically look at the text).
Teacher becomes the mediator for student discussion to pull together the deeper meaning on the story and pick up the “gems” that need to be melded together.

Significant Word Groups: Be intentional about noticing. Do not singularly look at vocabulary but look at the phrase or group of words for combined meaning (veil of mist)

Quantities of quality text (cutting edge texts for kids). Less about doing activities and more about focusing in on logging word groups.  We need to create a hungriness in our students for a deeper want to learn.

Learning conditions need:
Word Consciousness Cultivation
Rich Language and Word Availability
Explicit Word Attention
Word Learning Strategies

Developing a culture of word-consciousness, while creating a community of Word gathers.
Word hunters
Hungry for words
 Word crazy
Word power/powerful
Word wizards
Collect-grab-share
‘Human’ dictionaries

To be relevant vocabulary must be:
in text-in context
Available-notice
multiple encounters
engaged with

WORDPLOSION: Digging deep for the underlying meaning of a word and then you are able to understand the word family.
Example: Employ
-explain it: to enhance something/to put to use
-family members: employee, employment, employed,
employing, reemploy
As texts become more complex, language and structure, vocabulary, concept knowledge and thinking and meaning bring upon deeper student understanding.

Deep Diving
We want kids to be mindful readers. Deep diving comes from talking about it. Students are viewing, reading, noticing, and talking with each other and the teacher.

Newspaper article
Headline: what clues does it offer about the main points? What is amazing about that? What do you want to know now?
Paragraphs 1 and 2: Dig the details of the article to help answer the questions further
Use images and movie clips when appropriate

Slow down to take small chunks to pick up ideas. Looking at groups of words. What are the surface meanings of those words?

Looking ahead to 2019

As I think ahead to 2019, I am excited for what 2019 will bring as I prepare to move back into a year ⅞ classroom. I am looking forward to working with a new group of students after rolling up with mostly the same group this past year. I am excited to possibly revisit a combination of my prior two inquiries into my own teaching to see the impact that they can make on a year 7/8 classroom in comparison to the year ⅘ classes I was with in 2017-2018. I am excited to look deeper into the ways that we, as year ⅞ teachers, can support students by using NCEA vocabulary in our learning tasks and small group discussions to help promote student efficacy as they prepare for their College level exams. This will also help with bridging the gap from intermediate to high school. I am also interested in looking closer at the current gap from intermediate to high school. I would love to come up with ways to make that transition a smoother one for our students and their learning.

In 2019, I am wanting to further my confidence in DMIC style maths teaching and in doing so gain a deeper understanding of relating back to the big idea and providing opportunities for student engagement. I am looking forward to having students who have a previous understanding of the DMIC process which will hopefully allow up to focus on working together and learning from one another.

What do you want a PES student to leave our school with?

Today we met for the first time as our Year 7/8 (Team 5) staff and we spent some time exploring what we would like our PES year 8 students to leave us with at the end of the year.  This was an amazing activity to remind us what our end goal is and how important it is to teach the Key Competencies in our classrooms on a daily basis and how important it is to provide our students with opportunities to realise that the Pt. England Way are the bricks laid in front of them to travel life and be successful in future endeavours. 

We're ready for the end...now to focus on the first week of school as we begin our planning to lay the foundation for success in all of these areas this year. 

2016: Bring Out the Lego!

It's here!  A new school year!  Complete with new challenges, adventures, trials and successes!  This year, I am so excited to be part of Team 4, working with our Year 4-6 students.  Our block is separated into two learning zones, and on our side we have only Year 5-6 students.  There are four teachers working with approximately 90-100 students in an Open Plan Modern Learning Environment.

I was gifted a big box of Lego last school year, and I was so excited to bring them out for our students to play with during our first rainy day lunch.  Once the initial shock of seeing so many Lego wore off, the excitement and creativity that flowed through the students who chose to play with them was inspiring.  As I begin to think about my personal teaching inquiry this year, I keep being reminded of that big ol' crate of Lego.

At this point in their school adventure, my students have heard so many things about what to do and what not to do when crafting their own piece of writing.  Unfortunately, for most of them they have a toolbox of tricks and bits of information that is as unorganised and shocking as my crate of Lego.

My inquiry this year is to use formative assessments to help take those crazy toolboxes of writing tricks and bits of information and turn them into something that opens a clear pathway of understanding for my students when they sit at their computer and begin to type.

My students will hopefully learn to become excited writers who are able to turn words on a page into a document that meets the necessary requirements for the task at hand.

Turning this...

Into this....