Staff meeting with Rob 25/05/2021

 Link to Rob's slideshow

Planning a week:

• Warm up
• unit focus
• warm down

...say 5 sessions over a fortnight, plus a rich learning activity (see below), include a problem to see what the students already know; one session to focus on retention: routine, opportunities to reactivate and apply = 8 sessions.

Move and Prove:

Ch'n need to have the understanding and language to prove; don't forget that the middle is the safe place (and if you're in the middle you need to be able to say why they didn't like this answer or that answer)

Following an initial Move and Prove, you could teach to the focus and then revisit the Move and Prove on Friday, or whatever, to see whether everyone in the room can voice their thinking. Can you rephrase or revoice? If you're in a corner you must be able to do these things. This is a rule!

Which One Does Not Belong? (dice, finger pattern, tens frame, TT2 sticks, counters, etc.)

Ongoing records will keep just in time assessment alive.

NZMaths:

• units of work by strand ---> LTPs (there are full year plans there)
• rich learning activities (1 per fortnight would be enough); pre enquiry or at the end; describes the procedural vs the conceptual approaches; one of these could be used per term for moderation purposes
• problem solving activities for diagnostic purposes; these include supports to develop pedagogical content knowledge

Pepper the week with formative assessment snapshots. 

Structured Literacy 21/05/2021

 Mel and Felicity from Kaiapoi North - link to their slideshow:

Me mahi tahi tatou,

Mo te oranga o te katoa.

We should work together for the wellbeing of everyone.

Liz Kane worked with these teachers.

Why:

• Simple view of reading: decoding x language comprehension = reading comprehension
• Scarborough's Rope
• Phonics.UK

Meanings of words: PA

David Kilpatrick

• Equipped for Reading Success: first 124 pp. are brilliant; how to explicitly teach and cue the children; how to build orthographic mapping
• View on Youtube? Check PAST test David Kilpatrick
• Heggarty for NEs, Year 1 and Year 2
• DK focuses on advanced phonemic awareness; more rigorous than Bridging  the Gap
• Liz Kane's PA screener for younger ch'n then the PAST test (more rigorous) for older students
• Anything of DK is gold!
• Big focus on knowledge and automaticity
• Link to the importance of phonemic effiency

Whole class tchg.

• Equipped for Reading Success (from Learning Matters in NZ)
• N.B., the blank cards for use with small or whole group: e.g., change 'act' to 'ant' - pull out the middle blank card and change it for a card of a different colour
• Good for extra coverage and practice
• exposure to another opp is beneficial despite the fact that not all ch'n will be up to that level
• have everything in your sound pack which has been covered by the highest level group
• use this before play, after lunch, before home, even right at the start of the day
• flick through quite fast; this is quite pacey/snappy (which is why you can do this multiple times each day
• if you hear something that isn't quite right just put it to one side and then at the end just go through them again at the end correcting as you go
• use A5 cards
• as children become very fluent and efficient, you can take some cards out
• sound packs go all the way through the school: in the small group situation, encode as well as decode
• juniors have sev small hits a day using Heggerty
• Don't just go through week by week; make it work for the group; lots of little hits frequently and often; move through the blue quite quickly; focus on what the children need to move forward
• Heart words: taught in small groups; reviewed in whole class; heart words are irreg words which cannot be sounded out or encoded
• How to teach a heart word: see the new version of The Code... use magic words grid; blow up and laminate; how many sounds
• Go to Heart Word Magic - just use these little videos for self not with the children
• Send the grid home to parents

KNS progressions:

• Year 1: PA; Explicit Teaching of The Code; Explicit Teaching, The Content: Plan Structure Language; Constant Focus (4 columns with phases beneath, e.g., I can segment sentences into words, etc...)
• by end of Year 1, try to have the children up to Stage 5 or 6, even 4+; by the end of Year 2, try to have the children back on to the colour wheel

Progressions through the school:

• NE LLL stage 0-4
• Yr 1/2 Stages 5-7
• Year 3/4 moving to PM type readers and Top Rope, with the Code
• Year 5/6 Top of the Rope focus and The Code (morphology and etymology): hot spot, PA, Sound pack, review, new learning
• Year 7/8: as for Year 5/6
• Emphasis on review
• Explicit teaching is most important
• at then end of Stage 6, teach the silent 'e' rather than waiting till Stage 7.4, bec children really do need this knowledge earlier rather than later
• the children who have completed Stage 7, tend to go on to turquoise
• use the RtoRs by sending them home to the parents with a note for the parent to read to the child - never expect the children to read these!

How do you make it fit?

• typical lesson is 20 minutes
• Must haves in a lesson: 1. Phonemic Awareness... 2. review of sound pack (always the vowels and recently taught sounds; some sounds from the very beg could be taken out) - decode...; 3. encode sound pack (always vowels and recently taught sounds - 9 sounds - then decode)...; 4. include review at word level of recently taught skill...; 5. then rotate: a. new learning: decode/encode - possibly decode or encode at sentence level for student practice...; b. other times decodable text; c. other times dictation... - if taking decodable text - do PA, sound pack, choose words from text to decode/encode before text
• this is pretty much exactly what we're doing - yay!

Writing - The Writing Revolution:

• can of worms
• do not embark yet - it's far too early in the piece for the following yet... 
• The Six Principles of the Hochman Method: 1. explicit instruction; 2. sentences are the building blocks; 3. embedded in the content of the curriculum; 4. content of the curriculum drives the rigour of the writing activities; 5. grammar best taught in the context of student writing; 6. two most important phases of the writing process are the planning and revision stages

Resources:

• all practical - activities
• UFLI is amazing
• The Literacy Nest (or Next?)
• Five for Five - there's a parent part as well as a teacher part
• Emily Hanford - USA advocating for change
• Lifting Literacy Aotearoa - join

Jnr:

• See PP
• Dictated sentence often just taken from the decodable text; make it up the night before so that it incorporates heart words as well as the spelling patterns being focused on
• VAK = visual, auditory, kinaesthetic
• Don't send the text home until children are totally fluent and confident
• What's in the box? It's a /g/, /oa/, /t/, etc.
• Rainbow image to reinforce initial and final sounds in words
• Only start teaching heart words once the children are ready for their first books
• individual dusters (very cute) from Office Max
• What ever you write, you read
• Repeat and revise if there is any confusion
• Sound packs: children should make the sound once only, rather than bouncing it
• MSL (Multisensory Structured Literacy): little sayings for the vowels - a apple /a/; i itchy /i/
• always say the sound as they write
• introducing the letter 'n': say it, practise, model it, write it, revise what was the letter name? what is the sound?
• add the new sound at the end of a word - tan... segment then blend
• start of a word - not
• write some CVC words using the new letter
• words in isolation straight into a word
• next day, sentence words incorporating the new letter or straight on to Tim and the Van, but teach the new CVC words from the book first
• teaching /ai/ within a word (see videos)
• Assessment - every day; no Obs Survey on entry
• Each term the screening tool again but not the whole thing, just the gaps
• What is the Record of Reading (Little Learners)?
• HL: book with sounds (practise writing at home and making the sounds); once they know the sounds, send home letter packs; info for parents re word building using those sounds (no books yet of course); bulldozer words (push the sounds together to read the words); push tog to make one speech stream, i.e., ta-p or t-ap.
• Talk with the children about sliding the sounds to make one speech stream
• one of the Reading Rocket videos shows Linda Farrell demonstrating this
• parent meetings to demonstrate any new teaching
• Sentence strips - make 
• teach the sounds for the next level, towards the end of the previous stage
• phonemic awareness activity pack resource
• 5 from 5 handout for parents
• Sunshine decodables are vg (teacher's resource book too)
• See Mel's heart word lesson plan
• syllable game: hand under chin to count the syllables as you say the word
• Beat basket with a drum
• lots of games from the Measured Mom
• Carpet mats: 3 in a row to jump, e.g., b-a-g
• Sentence: how many words? balls of dough to squash for each word
• Little picnic rug: for each word, put a tiny teddy on the rug
• Stay away from fingers for the words in a sentence; keep them for phonemes
• Head tummy toes, e.g., c-a-p
• they have to be able to blend onset rime before you can ever start looking at CVC words and segmenting/blending, box of farm animals in the box, 'I've got a g-oat, a p-ig, a h-en.
• a apple /a/ (hold an apple near your mouth)
• e eddy /e/ (two fingers spiralling down)
• i itchy /i/ (two fingers scratching an arm)
• o olive /o/ (finger and thumb forming an 'o' shape
• u upper /u/ (finger and thumb forming a 'u' shape)

*Talk with Jo about a Heggerty book.

*make new sets of letter cards for use with the whole class - A5 size; laminated?

Maths Assessment and Hero 11/05/2021

 Use of green and yellow on Hero to show their achievement and next goals:

• Green is both summative and formative proof the child knows and applies
• Green is built through regular opportunities to revisit
• Green is better assessed through cohort moderation.

We will primarily be using JAM and E-asTTle (for Level 2 and above) as the tools to help us to assess mathematics. GloSS gives us an extra insight for ākonga who require further evidence for a professional judgment.

There is also pressure from principals to use the Learning Progressions.

Our schedule for assessment:

JAM is our tool for Years 0-2 for all areas of Maths:

• Pretest: JAM - Number and Algebra, and Geometry and Measurement
• Report 1: JAM - Number and Algebra
• Pretest: JAM - Stats and Probability
• Report 2: JAM - Number and Algebra, Geometry and Measurement, Stats and Probability

By Week 6 (T.O. Day), all of our children need to have had a JAM, so that we can input the data on to Hero that day.

Link to Maths Assessment and Hero slideshow.