Talented Young Writers' Workshop

What a privilege it is to be part of the Canterbury Literacy Association and the amazing opportunities they provide for education in Canterbury.

As a committee member, I got to spend the day at the Talented Young Illustrators' Workshop at Ferrymead. This day is designed as an opportunity for schools to put forward students with special skills and a special interest in illustrating. The two students that attended from my school were very excited about the day - and it exceeded their expectations.

I felt the same way!

The day started with Gavin Bishop who taught us all about understanding just what goes into a picture book. It's like an iceburg - most of the work is behind the scenes. Picture books have restrictions that novels don't and it takes a lot of thought to overcome those.

It turns out that a picture book has 32 pages all because of money! 32 pages fit on piece of paper. End papers do not count as the 32 pages but are part of the binding of a hard cover book. Page 1 and 32 are the only 'single' pages in a book, and the rest are 'double-page spreads'.

Illustrations begin with a story board, where double pages are designed together to compliment each other. The storyboard plans everything - including covers and titles. Consideration has to be given most importantly to the words - you don't want them crowded out by the illustrations. The illustrations for Gavin's Book 'Rat's' took six months. A book can take over a year from go to whoa - sometimes several years.

Pictures are so important to these stories. They fill out the story and sometimes introduce a new sub-story that you may not even notice the first time you read it. Take for example the page of rats that reads, "They invaded her bath." How many words would you need to describe that picture? 

Not only do you need to read the words - but also read the pictures. 

The students finished this workshop with the challenge to create an opening image for the nursery rhyme 'Sing a Song of Sixpence.'


I also really enjoyed listening to David Elliot - especially about his time working as a Zoo gatekeeper and living at the zoo - using that as inspiration for his art. He started making plasticine animals and began drawing them the way he made them - start with blobs then pinch, squeeze, pinch - add bits on and take bits off until you have a finished product.

David talked about using quiet lines to start the basic shape of your drawing and getting louder as you add the detail on each layer.

Most importantly her talked about not being afraid to make mistakes. Just make mistakes and think 'how can I make my mistake better?' A drawing is about half what you want it to be and half what it tells you it wants to be.

He also talked that he also uses this technique for writing. Start with an outline and re-write and mould it.



Our last workshop was with Stuart Hale, who talked us through taking amazing photos with an iPad. Rule one - turn your grid-lines on. Rule two - follow the rule of thirds rule. We had great fun taking photos and hunting for the Alphabet in nature!

A busy year! Time to get back into blogging....

Wow! Term three due to start already. Time has really flown this year and I've had so many amazing opportunities thrown at me - it's been remarkable.


But before I go into all my reflection (catching up in one big long go), I think it is necessary to reflect upon the goals I set myself at the beginning of the year.


Goals:
1 Get Place Value teaching and assessing under tighter scrutinyAssessment has definitely improved and with that comes more awareness of needs. I have managed to focus more explicit teaching in this area - with noticeable results for some students.

2 Focus more on explicit teaching of reading strategies.Still an area in progress according to the classes end of term reflection. Students could confidently tell me what they had learned in writing and maths but found reading much more difficult. Time to pull out the modelling book more frequently!

3 Maintain and continue developing on-line collaboration and connections
Yes and no - along with blogging, Twitter has taken a back seat as far as contributing goes. I need to keep working on this. I did make it to Educamp Dunners but unfortunately not to my own hometown Educamp! I can only hope the opportunity comes up later in the year again.

4 Improve recording and collation of summative data
Happening! (Yay!) And across all curriculum areas.

5 Be nominated and successful in the position of staff representative on the Board
Done.

6 If possible, get a management unit - or at least run my responsibilities like I deserve it!
Done.

7 Jog 5km (I'm realistic, not Superwoman)
I WAS getting there, and then winter and reports happened and I discovered it's not fun to run in the dark.

8 >10.2.68 (Yes, this is cryptic...)
Needs attention.

9 Take up a new evening course or activityDone - and I'm thoroughly enjoying learning and creating in my acrylic and mixed media class.

10 Chill out and take more time for myself
Getting there. Some times are better than others.



Term three looks to bring better teaching practice within the classroom, especially in the areas of literacy.


Early in the year I identified that many of my students needed help with listening to sounds to aid their spelling and also, for many, their decoding. Having done my degree in linguistics I had a fair idea that it was their phonological awareness that was letting them down and so I needed to put into place a phonics programme. Most of the teachers within the school have attended Yolanda Soryl workshops and so my request to attend one myself was happily received. Yolanda still teaches (now as reading recovery), as well as runs her workshops and produces her fantastic resources. That meant a bit of a wait for one of her extremely popular workshops - so I spent some of my release time observing and reading up on how to implement the lessons. From there, I was able to develop my own basic programme and now that I've had the training I can refine my lessons further. I've also decided to timetable in short periods during the week to focus purely on listening to sounds (phonological awareness).

I felt for many of my students that there needs were very basic and were 'gaps' that needed consolidating. Not having experience myself in the junior area of the school, I had to grapple for a little bit, wondering the most efficient and beneficial way of introducing these. It was great timing that Jill Eggleton was to be presenting 'Lighting the Literacy Fire' - with a focus on Reading. She covered some of what I knew - oral language, keep it simple, embedding comprehension, and focusing on vocabulary - but gave practical and effective ways of delivering all of this each day. For me, it was one simple book. To have a shared book, everyday, without fail and a clear, consistent plan of what gets covered each day. Every week since that workshop I have had a shared book or poem and it's so obvious now the benefits it has had. The children are transferring the learning to their guided reading groups and their writing, AND verbalising what they are doing and how they know to do it!!! 

"Reading is making sense. Not sounds." 

--Jill Eggleton--

I loved that Jill Eggleton was pro banning worksheets, however, I did question where eLearning and future focused learning comes into her model. I was taken back to the iPads in Literacy presentation by Stuart Hale, that was put on by the Canterbury Literacy Society earlier in the year. One of the first things he encouraged was for the teacher to engage with the technology them self. If you become a user, you become a pusher. He believes (as do I) that schools can not be the last place to know the future. He spoke of many apps and ways to use iPads for literature based activities (Wordbook, Piccollage, Stripdesigner, Lifecards, Puppetpals, Book Creator, Tinytap, Amazon). He emphasised though, that devices are designed to be personal - so ultimately schools should be heading towards BYOD. And I know that many are. In line with the e-learning planning framework, my take-a-way was that use of iPads and devices should be moving away from the emerging, engaging stage and towards the extending and empowering. That means allowing students to use higher-order thinking to be creative (use creativity apps) with their devices.

All of this learning was topped off, with an amazing opportunity to attend the New Zealand Literacy Association annual conference (thanks to both the Auckland and Canterbury Literacy Associations for their sponsorship.) The best part of attending a conference such as this is being with like-minded people and, this time, the wealth of knowledge and experience from both the presenters and the attendees in the room. 

The plenary highlight, for me, was Steven Layne. He spoke of sparking a flame for reading - and fanning it. He talked about fires within the classroom.

• The Bonfire - controlled and has to be prepared prior, needing the right tools, materials and place.
• The Flash fire - very sudden and occurs when two combustible materials come together (certain child + certain book).
• The Wild fire - uncontrolled, unexpected and often happens by accident.

He finished by telling us a story about a child he had taught early in his career who had said to him "You guys have made all the decisions before we even show up, you don't care what we're interested in." Steven changed his approach because of this statement, and it made me think about my approach. In general, I think in New Zealand we are pretty flexible and well resourced to be able to do this. My personality tends to usually fit the 'bonfire' profile. I'm a planner and I need to know the direction I'm going. I have to ask myself, do I allow enough room for change within my plans once I get to know my children?

My workshop highlight was Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsey introducing their new book - The Writing Book. They spoke about children having a writers tool box - the skills and knowledge. The spoke of the importance of generating ideas and providing support with this, QuickWrites, their burger model, showing children how to plan, QuickStops, responding to writing and improving writing (may only be one or two things). Children should know what they're learning, be able to find examples in their own writing, improve their own writing, talk about their successes and next steps and feel like an author by sharing their writing. From listening to Sheena and Louise and referring to their book, there are a lot of things I do well. My next steps with writing is to provide more opportunities for my students to feel like authors. I also think that sometimes I'm a little too hard on my writers and could do with scaffolding some of them a little more with their structure and editing.

So, it's a continuing literacy journey. I'm also lucky within this first half of the year to have gained my first aid certificate, have a first year student teacher (to return again later in the year), be elected to the BOT and to attend a Sport Start course provided by Sport Canterbury to implement their programme into our school/syndicate. Sport Start is focused around teaching students strategies and generic skills instead of specific games and units such as 'small balls'. 

I hope that the remainder of the year is as enlightening as the first half. I look forward to the term ahead - being only nine weeks, I'm sure it will fly by!

Reflection upon term 3

Well, we've now had two full weeks in our changed classroom and it seems to be ticking along quite nicely. I'm enjoying having the freedom of literacy workshops - it feels more flexible and that if I need to spend a little more time with a group, or a particular child I can do that. I feel I have better tabs on where everyone is at and where they are going. I would say though, that all of my targeted workshops are based on hard assessment and I think that is important.

The six page plan is actually working very well and as long I have a direction in mind for the week, it's not hard to whip up the formalities throughout the week. I usually try to plan Monday-Tuesday/Wednesday, then revisit the needs for the second part of the week.

One thing that I have noticed is that the children are often choosing diffferent places to sit, but not neccessarily different people. I have started taking short videos around the class so I can analyse them a bit more - but my first step is to give more direction about choosing sensible people to sit beside. Many of the children have identified this as an area of need for them.

I think the children are enjoying more responsibility and are generally stepping up to the mark (today was hopefully a one-off!). We are doing a Friday review for both literacy and numeracy, in the form of a WOW factor - something postive, and a Hot-Tip - something to work on. I make an effort to take those home and read them over the weekend so I clearly know where the childrens heads are at, then we re-read and remind on Monday when they glue them into their books.

The first week, the children really didn't have too much direction. So we looked at what a good reflection and goal setting was. This week, I'm blown away! (Although we still need to work on adding 'because..')

Some examples of WOW factors:

• I enjoyed sitting by other people because it helped me learn.
• I learnt to subtract by slitting numbers into parts so I could use tidy numbers.
• I enjoyed learning the three rules of speech marks.
• This week I enjoyed soing to group sessions.
• I thought my recount was cool because I used language features.
• I learnt how to jump the number line two different ways.
• I think that I made a good choice of book becasue it was very similar to the kind of person I am.

Some examples of Hot Tips:

• I need to choose to sit by myself sometimes so I can get my work done.
• I need to move onto my next times tables level.
• I need to use a ruler to rule my lines. (!!!!)
• I need to use more language features.
• I want to be more involved in reading.
• I need to sometimes sit beside a boy. (???? less distraction?)
• I need to help others by not telling them the answer.

The ultimate planning template

I'm always on the quest to find/develop the best template for planning.

Alongside the changes with flexible spaces in the classroom I wanted to run more workshop based learning as I'm aware of the diverse range of needs across the classroom - in particular within the area of literacy.

This meant I really wanted to run my weekly reading and writing plans together along with personalised learning options. (Previously I had been running my personalised learning tasks as week long tasks but found most students needed more scaffolding so I changed them to daily.)

This is what I've come up with so far. It is a work in progress and I will reassess the managibility of it as I go. My biggest issue that I can already see - but not sure how to get around - is that it will be 6 pages long each week. One page for the overview plus one page per day.

What do you think?

I've just had a middle of the night thought! Theoretically, I could just put the day part of the plan up on the board and the children "sign in" directly onto the plan if they're going to participate in a workshop. They will also be able to see their must-dos and can-dos, saving me the time to re-rewrite them....

Personalised/Independent Learning

I've been trialing with my Year 4/5 students independent learning. Many other teachers call this personalised learning, as I did too when I first started using the concept. I'm still not sure that independent or personalised are the best words to describe how this looks in my class. I'm still working on the ultimate name..... differentiated, specialised, customised, individualised..... self-directed, targeted....

At the moment, I'm running this time during my reading block. While I'm teaching my reading groups, the rest of the children are completing word study, handwriting, journal writing and blogging tasks. At the beginning of the week I present the children with a list of must-dos and can dos. I have found that many of the children in the class can successfully manage thier time and begin completing the can-do tasks. However, some don't even get half of their must-dos done because they don't yet have the concept of time-management.

The other problem I was having was that often things would crop up during the week and they would not be on the list, and by the following week the idea was 'out of date.' This was temporalily fixed by leaving space on the list for tasks to be added to. Or, school events and class tasks for specific students would crop up and by Friday there was not enough time for many of the tasks to be completed. This left the students feeling like they had underachieved and not rewarded for their hard work because they had not got to the can-do activities. What to do.?.?.?.

Fortunately, a very timely opportunity came up for me to go and listen to some interesting 10 minute presentations at a CAGE (gifted education) meeting. Here, I heard the amazing reports of year 2 students successfully completing daily timetables. These students were then spending time each Friday to reflect upon thier time coming up with a WOW factor, and a Hot Tip (next step). Then they would set a goal and write a letter home informing their parents of thier goal.

A year 3-4 teacher was doing something very similar with her students. Each day she presents must-dos and WILDs (What I'd Like to Do) to her students via Edmodo. The students were then able to upload their work the site and parents could access it via home as. This teacher also talked about James Nottingham's Learning Pit. Her class instead, had a Tightrope for Learning which was represented by a string across part of the room where each child had thier photo joined to a body. By pegging themselves upright the teacher could clearly see who was finding things too easy and could then approach the student to put them in the wobbling zone - pegged sideways. If the child was upside-down the teacher could clearly see they had fallen off, again, indicating to the teacher she needed to make time to catch up with that student. I love this idea and I think it would effectively within a classroom.

Next steps...

• Build in a Friday reflection and goal setting
• Utilise our school Ultranet site to present daily tasks
• Include more 'fun' personal experience can-dos

Jill Eggleton - Writing Course

For me, one of the biggest everyday occurences that I stuggle with is teaching writing. I'm forever looking for the best way! I don't know why writing is so challenging - but what I do know, is that I'm not the only person who finds it to be like this.
Is it because children work at such different paces? Is it because there are sooooo many different needs? Is it because it's not a black and white science? Is it that I havn't found/adapted/produced enough meaningful writing activities? Is it harder to teach writing in the senior school? (My theory to this one is yes.....) Or, is it just me?

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to go to a writing conference by literacy guru Jill Eggleton. It was eyeopening and helpful in many ways. (Unfortunately, my biggest challenge has not been solved - I will continue to fight the groups/not groups, fixed/flexible groups, timing issue.) I had four major take-outs:

• quality not quantity, encourage short pieces of writing that can be well re-crafted (also, length puts a lot of children off)
• there is no good writing, only good re-crafting
• Writing is about a message - always positively feedback to this. Writing isn't spelling.
• You shouldn't DO writing. Instead, writing should have a meaningful context. Eg, "We are going to try and convince the principal that we should wear mufti, so to do this we need to use the structures and features of an exposition/persuasion." OR "We are going to be learning about the moon. In order to present our information, we need to know and use the features of report."

Where to from here?

• adpat my approach to writing to meet the above
• create a level 2/3 tick list of success criteria that each child can have in the back of thier book and tick off each time they achieve. Eg, I can write in compound sentences.

High Decile v Low Decile

I've been thinking about this a bit lately. It should be noted that I only have experience working in a low decile school. However, coincidentally I have had three professional conversations relating to this topic just recently, with three different people.

Low decile schools get more funding (what that is, I'm not sure, but I believe it is significant). I believe the reasoning behind this is because lower decile children are lower achievers. However, does that mean to say all, or most, high decile children are high achievers? I was talking to teacher of a high decile school, who was telling me that 85%ish of her numeracy class (she did have the lowest streamed class of three classes at her year levels), were below the national standard. That is a huge number for a smallish amount of students. Why aren't they getting the funding to help them?

Working in a low decile school, I would say the resources I have access to are excellent. We have a wide range of reading material, an extensive library for both students and teachers for professional learning, we are starting to build up some great e-learning resources, and we have pretty plentiful maths resources as well. Our school has managed to fund an out of class numeracy and literacy facilitator for some years and has been able to provide extra literacy and numeracy support for at risk children. Our kids (most) are moving! Do high mid and high decile schools get the same opportunities?

EITC - for the teacher!

Today I visited another school with the focus of looking at their literacy programme. And what an enlightening morning! It's always great to see what others are doing. First, because there is always the chance to learn, improve and try new things (sharing! what a wonderful concept) and secondly, because it helps you to realise that there are areas that you are doing ok in!

Reading: This school streamed for reading and I observed two classes; "the lowbies" and "a bit higher." 

The lowbies: the purpose of the reading programme in this room was to encourage stimulating material to interest and encourage reading. The children were in a 'social' group and a reading group (as I do now, except my purpose is based around behaviour). The social group followed rotations such as browsing boxes, listening post, free choice, grammar activities (word finds, cross words etc - books of them that you can pick up at reasonable prices), www.starfall.com, and blogging. The teacher pulled out reading groups as required. The structure of what I saw in this class was similar to what I plan for my own class.
The class environment was more stimulating for reading, and this is probably what I need to set up better. The interactive whiteboard displayed Sheena Cameron's "What do good readers do?" the whole time. I didn't see it referred to by the teacher, but there was also a copy printed on the wall by the task board and I understand the children refer to it independently. The wall was also set up with all the strategies and prompt cards that the children could take and use at their desks independently. A strategy card (one only - WALT) was placed on the teaching table in front of each child as well for the child to refer to.

A bit higher: these students can cope with a bit more writing so had lots of text based activities on the go. Rotations included wordfind, picture story, writing short story from photo, blogging, browsing boxes, story pyramid, retell, free reading, spelling words and sentences, new vocab, www.imagechef.com - word magic (with vocab words) and specific activities relating to group reading. Groups were included in the taskboard to see the teacher. Guided reading sessions included some time to share what they had been doing etc. One group had been writing stories relating to what they had read so for their teacher time they had to talk about what they had written and then as a group they discussed vocab etc.

Where to for me?

I think because of the behaviour and learning needs in my class I need to keep my rotations as reading based and pretty basic. However, for my higher end groups I need to start giving them extra activities that relate to their reading - especially vocabulary based activities. I also think that one of my rotations needs to be grammar based activities - so I need to get my hands on some 'activity books.'

Writing: A year 4 class

Lesson started with recap of yesterdays WALT and then books were handed out so children could look and reflect upon what they had achieved.
Todays focus: Dictionary Skills and Proofreading
Lots of great use using the Interactive Whiteboard and Active Inspire.
- Alphabetical Order
- Spelling Corrections
- Child's sample of work, get it started with editing

"Proofreading is all about doing your writing slowly."

Where to next?

Don't expect the children to write everyday!!! Take time to teach editing and give the children time to work through it with some guidance. Also, set up writing buddies to critically analyse. This will take time to set up guidelines and expectations so the children are giving worthwhile feedback and feedforward.

Amazing Blog

I've come across many great blogs and resources, and I add many of their links to my own blog. However, this blog puts anything and everything literacy based all in the one place!

www.word-wizz.blogspot.com

Handwriting

http://www.thespec.com/living/healthfitness/article/552797--the-perks-of-handwriting

A very interesting article on handwriting. It has certainly changed my mind about how I teach handwriting because I was starting to go down the path of "once children can write the letter why bother to keep teaching them because people are writing less and less."