Running dictation

Today I had a few students to start with so we had the opportunity to do a fun activity which I have learnt from my TESSOL course plus it is the Tongan language week. The children are divided into groups of 5 where they have to organise themselves so they will have a recorder and a runner. They will also have a turn in being a runner and recorder. The runner must run and read the text on their sheet of paper from the whiteboard then run back and report it back to the recorder. The next runner will repeat the same thing until the text is finished. The challenge was that first half of the text was in Tongan and the last part was in English. The children are familiar with the text.

The children absolutely love it. They were working well in their groups. Not every group was able to complete the activity but they were all excited and all put effort into completing the activity.

Children had so much fun, they were helping each other and they were so proud of what they had achieved.

Cummins Framework

This past three weeks I have been learning about Cummins Framework. This framework has taught me a lots of things about the activities that I provide for my students.

In this assignment I was able to discuss what I have observed and analysed, whether the activities that I have provided for the students are catered for my bilingual learners’ needs or not. I have chosen a group of students to complete five activities in the classroom and for each activity I have determined whether the intended learning intention has been achieved or not. Then a set of principles was emerged which I believe are necessary to ensure that future activities are suitable to meet the needs of bilingual learners in my classroom.

The purpose of this assignment was to closely observe and analyse the activities with reference to Cummin’s “quadrant” framework by discussing the match or mismatch between my intended outcomes and the actual outcomes for each activity. Within the framework I have to place the five activities from my classroom in each “quadrant” and give explanation for my placement.

This assignment has taught me the importance of learning needs of my students. I need to consider the activities I am choosing to ensure that all my learners will be able to meet the learning intention. I need to consider the language that I need to use and always begin the lesson from context embedded tasks. By doing this I will ensure that my learners are extended and are being nurtured by our classroom activities in a safe environment.

Writing with my students

This week I have been focusing on Writing with my students.

We have been learning to use describing words in our story.

This is a follow up from my observation of Mrs. Sharma. She showed me how I could link the learning Intention with my success criteria. Our learning Intention was to use describing words in our stories. As my students highlighted the describing words in their stories, they got deeper understanding of the describing words and could see how they have met their success criteria.  Below is an example of  the work one of my students has done.

Incredible Years Training

Incredible Years Training

“Incredible Teachers: Nurturing Children’s Social, Emotional and Academic Competence” I have been Training for this course for the last few months. The last session was a bit heartening,  sitting there and listening to every teacher sharing the same challenges that we are facing in the classroom. At the same time it does confirm some of the strategies that we are using to manage those challenging children. It doesn’t matter whether you are teaching at a Decile 10 or Decile 1 school, there is always a group of students who will challenge us across the board.

Incredible Years Teachers is such a great programme which gives teachers a “variety of creative classroom management strategies to meet children’s development milestone” (Carolyn Webster -Stratton, 2012) Even though there are only one or two children with challenging behaviour in a classroom but sometimes at the end of the day, it feels like you have dealt with the whole class. They always take a lot of  our time, and it is the good students who are missing out because they always get on with their work quietly.

With these training sessions I have noticed that I have utilized some of the strategies in my classroom and I have developed more classroom management strategies which helped deterring negative behaviour in the classroom. I have learnt to ignore the undesirable behaviour and focus on the positive behaviours, constantly identifying positive behaviour to eliminate negative behaviour without mentioning it.

The other strategy is to build positive relationship with the students as soon as a child sets foot in your classroom. You must always be firm but fair. I have to agree with Rita Pierson that “ Every kid needs a champion.” At the IYT course, we were shown a diagram of a triangle. At the bottom of the triangle its all about building relationships. This is the part where the teacher needs to find out more about the student and getting to know them will build up their relationship with that child. Students who have developed a good relation will look at their teacher as their hero, their champion, and they will do anything to please you just because you listen and talk to them.

Praising is the third strategy that I have learnt. It raises their confidence and  gives them raising them the boost that they need for the day. AND…

have you notice one thing about our challenging students...

they will never miss a day of school.

Listening activity for ESOL students

Dictation in Junior Classrooms

This is a very cool activity that I learnt at Tessol this week.

It was taught to me by Maree Jeurissen. It is an activity that was designed by Robert Heath. Maree is a fantastic teacher who teaches in the lower primary school. Because I am in the primary school too, I always look forward to what she has to share with us in her lectures. Dictation was a very easy way to teach my students prepositions. Here a scanned copy of the activity. Please feel free to use it, if you like it. 

Maths: Multiplicative Thinking

Maths: Multiplicative Thinking

This week we had a PLD on Maths. Sue Pine showed us how we could make our students think multiplicatively and encourage them to solve problems in more that one way.

I found this PD very useful. Maths is my favourite subject to teach and getting new ideas from Sue was very exciting. I really enjoyed doing the activities that Sue had introduced with my students. When my students made arrays they could think of different ways to show their multiplicative thinking.

 For example: 4x8=32 can be shown in different ways like:

4 lots of 8 is 32

Students draw a picture to show their understanding.

Teacher modelling!

Benefit of having Teacher Modelling.

Modelling is a good way of sharing your knowledge with others. On Monday the 27th of July, Mrs Sharma was demonstrating how to teach writing in my classroom. By the way I am teaching a year 2 and 3 class for the first time and I am still finding my way around in the junior classes. I am really fortunate to have Mrs Sharma as a team leader because she has the experience in the junior classes and she is also able to share her knowledge through modelling.

She started off by reading a story book which motivates and also engaged the students attention. She also used the context and the visuals to draw out the vocabulary such as muddled, confused and lonely. During her reading she often stopped and questioned students to check their understanding for example how does the little Monkey feel when she lost her mum? The children were pretty focused because they were able to answer her straight way. The lesson flowed which was really great to see. She moved on straight from story reading to brainstorming ideas using the Y chart. The students had come up with lots of describing words for the story. She asked them simple questions that stimulated their critical thinking.

I have really enjoyed this observation because I was able to follow her lesson step by step from the beginning up to the end. Before this observation I found it really hard to plan the writing for this level. Earlier I used to find writing sample for the same level but the language was still too advanced for most of my students. But this worked really well because the story was short and very entertaining and had lots of describing words. She also gave them some sentence starters which helped them to start their draft.

During the teacher conference time, students were able to reflect on their WALT and success criteria. They were able to identify if they had achieved their goal or not then give their reasons for their answer. There was one thing that Mrs Sharma has always reminded me of is’ think/pair/ share’ which allows my students to share their ideas. I found it really hard to plan for writing at this level earlier but now I feel confident with my writing lesson and am pretty happy with what I am delivering since then.