1 hour viewing PD course online, 1 hour blogging, creating social media content and reviewing the Resource Library.
As a Seesaw Ambassador and Certified Educator I am required to do this refresher course every year. It is something I will continue to learn about as I am responsible for training staff at St Andrew’s with their use of Seesaw as a Digital Portfolio. I have been using Seesaw since 2015, and even though I am no longer teaching in a classroom, as the EALD teacher I still utilise this resource and platform.
What’s New in Seesaw?
Creative Canvas & Journal
You can modify the time limit on video recordings for students, capping them to a certain time frame for recordings.
New Thousandths cube image for inserts in mathematics.
A range of new colours.
Highlights! Great for PTI’s as a way to showcase student achievements like a portfolio! You can simply click the highlights button and it will be added to the highlights folder and you can add teacher notes in there as well.
NEW TOOLS:
Flex cards, like Flashcards but better!
Read-With-Me: reading activities to assist beginning readers, reads along with the student, highlights words as they are being read.
Short Answer and Open Ended Assessment options for student responses. A lot of these tools are also auto-graded! This will save you time and it gives you a report with the analysis of the students responses.
Reading Fluency Assessment: It collects and automatically assessed the reading examples for you!
Focus Mode: Allows you to hide tools that students won’t need for an activity. Makes it easier for students to navigate and use what they need, not play with unwanted tools.
Attach & Grade: Curriculum and Standards can be input by admin and used with assessment in Seesaw. This will log your grades and track student progress. We have not been using this at St Andrew’s yet but it was always something we were going to move towards in the future.
My Library:
You can now create custom sections to save your preferred or created activities. You can organise and reorder lessons, bulk sort and delete. If you haven’t been using the Seesaw Library, get onto it, so many great lessons ready for you to use.
EALD Resource!
This is what I am most excited about exploring! As the EALD teacher at my school, I will be reviewing these resources as a way of providing teachers with a resource for their EALD students in class. I only work three days in my current role, and am hoping to increase this in 2025. With this resource, teachers can access additional supports and resources via Seesaw!
New English Language Explorers: Newcomers. Supporting EALD students with Vocabulary practice.
Resource Library: Check out these new resources
My next steps will be to share this with staff and request a Staff Meeting PD session to inform staff on the new Seesaw updates and how we could be using this platform more consistently across the school.
I must do the following to maintain my Seesaw Certified Educator status:
Share this with Staff who would like to do some online Seesaw PD:
Get Started Website: This has everything you need to get started with Seesaw
The slides and resources within this post have been created by Dr Skye McLennan, and she has given permission for this content to be shared on my blog.
Session 1: Tuesday 11th June 2024.
Types of Learning Disorders covered in this session:
Dyslexia
Dysgraphia
Dyscalculia
Processing weaknesses are common:
working memory
executive functioning
Processing speed
Commonly co-occur with developmental disorders:
ADHD
ASD
Anxiety
Recommended Podcast:
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.
What about sight words? Visual memory is memorising the sequence of letters to identify sight words. Teaching high frequency words identifying the parts that are not decodable.
The 4 Stage Reading Chain:
Phonological Awareness: Awareness of the sounds (phonemes) within spoken words. (Early childhood, ELC/ Kindy)
Phonics: Decoding, the relationship between individual sounds (phonemes) and the letters that represent them (graphemes). Structured synthetic phonics programs.
Fluency: Repeated reading, model fluency first, they read it, time them and record them. Do it again 4 times in a single session. Improve speed. Improves comprehension. Must read aloud, make the text short and repeat it, individual task.
Comprehension
Reading Comprehension:
Students at risk here are EAL/D students, students with language disorders. Explicitly teaching the vocabulary.
More than 10 words a week is too much. Teaching multiple times over a week is important.
Audio Books help build vocabulary. Vocabulary needs explicit instruction.
Written Expression:
The process of writing is very complex. A child is having to access a variety of strategies and tools to create a text.
If a child is struggling with writing, we need to identify which area or areas they are struggling with. See diagram below.
Handwriting Heroes:
Session 2: Tuesday 18th June 2024.
Maths Intervention:
Consistent approaches and language used within schools is key.
Accommodations & Adjustments for Students with Specific Learning Disorders (SLD’s):
Working around the problem allows the student to access learning tasks. Reasonable adjustments are a legal obligation under the Disability Discrimination Act. Many children who have Specific Learning Disorders (SLDs) also have other mental-processing weaknesses. These need adjustments too.
– Working memory
– Executive functioning
– Attention
Reading Accommodations:
Word: Read aloud function.
Assistive Technology Recommendations:
See attached PDF: instructions to assist with accessibility.
How do we identify quality teaching and learning in EAL/D? Discuss
As we know, what is good for EAL/D learners is good for all English learners. Classroom teachers can use these strategies to assist all learners in their classroom and provide the supports, scaffolds and useful resources to engage and assist learning during English lessons.
What would you say are the top 5 ingredients to a successful learning experience? Discuss.
My Top 5 Ingredients:
Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning: What are we trying to achieve through this lesson? Knowing the goals, the learning intentions and success criteria to ensure you are clear about your lesson objectives and how students will be able to demonstrate their abilities. How will this be assessed? What are we looking for?
Knowing the content and how to teach it: Professional Knowledge to create content, provide relevant resources, suitable content for student engagement. Do you have all of the facts and relevant tools/ resources to use for student success?
Knowing your students and how they learn: Nobody knows your students better than you! Knowing your class and their specific needs, you will be able to plan for them to be successful in their own way, is this lesson accessible for all? What scaffolds will be required, who will need more assistance to access this lesson, who will require extension? How will I differentiate and offer different levels so that all can feel and achieve success?
Create and maintain a supportive and safe learning environment: Do we have what we need in our environment to give students options to learn in their way? Varied spaces, learning zones, areas to work independently or as a group. Do we have agreements and expectations about how we work together? Creating a safe learning environment will allow students to feel able to take risks, problem solve and collaborate, push themselves out of their comfort zone, without fear of judgement or criticism.
Student Engagement and Fun! Have you given the children choices to learn in a way that suits them? Do you have resources for visual or hands on learners? Are there elements of play or individual creativity? How are you providing the opportunity for student voice and choice? Is this lesson fun? If not fun, maybe interesting, sparking curiosity, creating a challenge that is intriguing… etc Are the students engaged?
Below is a demonstration lesson I planned for St Peter’s Girls. I was provided with the Learning Intention and Success Criteria. I knew I would be teaching a group of twelve Year 4 students and there would be girls with varying levels of English proficiency.
Learning intention:
We are learning about foregrounding and how to use attention grabbing information to begin a paragraph.
Success Criteria:
I can use foregrounding to write a paragraph on “Dogs are cute”.
As I didn’t know my students, I brought along many varying levels of resources about dogs, some digital, some printed books and translating tools on my iPad.
Some of you have just seen this presentation at the IPSHA EAL/D Collegial Hub Meeting at St Peter’s Girl’s School. As promised, here are the resources I used in the lesson:
IB Approaches to Learning 2-Day Professional Development
St Andrew’s School: Tuesday 23rd & Wednesday 24th January 2024 (15 hours)
Presenters: Vicki Shaver & Renee Rehfeldt
Over the last two days I participated in this IB Workshop about the Approaches to Learning. Here I have outlined what was covered over the two days, as well as some useful resources and some of my reflections and wonderings. I hope you find them useful.
Overall purpose of workshop:
What skills positively influence and support a student’s approach to life-long learning?
All IB programmes develop the approaches to learning (ATL) skills categories of communication, social, self-management, research and thinking.
Engagement with this workshop will support:
Developing a deeper understanding of ATL as a way for students to acquire and use skills developed over time in order to access learning.
Considering contemporary research in order to apply metacognitive strategies throughout the learning process, with an emphasis on assessment as learning.
Designing the curriculum to encourage students to build these skills.
Reflecting on how developing cognitive, affective and meta-cognitive skills using a variety of strategies may increase the capacity of learners to become self- regulated and intrinsically motivated.
DAY ONE:
This is the link to the Padlet which has so many great resources. It will remain online for us to access. Check it out, it has IB documents, additional resources and an area all about Thinking Skills, we (teaching staff) can add to the padlet and share our plans as well.
We began the day with a fun activity that required the use of the Approaches to Learning (ATL) Skills including: thinking, communication, social, self-management and research. We did a BreakOut EDU task, requiring us to break into the box by code breaking in our table groups. There were a series of challenges which we solved as a team. This was a great activity that you could do with your class, and update it to get students to create their own break-out challenges for us or peers. Enjoyed this one.
As a group we were asked to create a visual poster that showed how the ATL and Learner Profiles relate. This was a tricky one, but we had many creative responses.
Self-Management Skills:
Decision making as a class, understanding that our actions have a flow on effect. I loved this idea of making decisions and seeing the outcomes of those decisions through the “What Should Danny Do?” Book series. There is also a series called “What Should Darla Do?” as well.
We brainstormed all of the ways we teach and foster self-management skills in our classrooms, including setting routines, expectations, roles and responsibilities of the students, mindfulness and reflective tasks etc.
For me, as an EALD teacher, this task was really relatable and useful for the communication skills of my students. I will be using these more often in my lessons with my students. Mainly, this sort of task assists with conversation skills and explaining one’s thinking.
Thinking Skills:
We did a Mathematics lesson using these templates for year levels. We were encouraged to make the thinking visible by prompting thinking times at different stages of the lesson.
Information Literacy, Media Literacy & Ethical Use of Media/ Information.
We did a group activity determining the best after school snack. We had to use facts to back our opinion of the best after school snack. This process was them opened up, where people tallied their preferences for after school snacks and questioned the facts. With the data, we discussed what we could do with out students to teach them about facts, how to be more specific and clear with our facts, how to compare the facts.
What does it mean to be principled? Academic Integrity, is doing the right thing, the honest thing on your work.
Wonderings:
How will displays support ATL Skill development? Teacher created and student created? Start of year set-up, visual posters, activities that engage students in those skills, having provocations, discussions, spaces to explore and learn from. How will students be invited to create and be seen to own their learning space?
How will our learning spaces & digital spaces support our students with their ATL development? I am looking into this with my “Seesaw” Hat on, how can we make the ATL Skills visible as tags on learning tasks consistently across the school? We have Digital Portfolios on Seesaw, and I feel we need to continue our learning and development of that space to reflect our IB culture and values.
How will initial routines support ATL Skill development? Consistency and use of the ATL language and visual representations across the school, will assist in this process. Students will begin seeing, using and understanding the language and applying this to their everyday lives.
Take Aways:
Split Screen Learning Goals:
I’m glad this come up for me again, it was something I have wanted to use in my lessons at the very beginning of the lesson to set the tone and then reflect on at the end of the lesson. Yes we are learning about this content today and we are also focusing on these skills today.
For the last part of day 2 we were given time to reflect on our own class planning and which ATL skills we would be intentionally focusing on and teaching in our first unit of inquiry. As the EALD teacher, I spent this time reviewing my planners from previous years and looking at how the ATL skills could be highlighted or evident in my planning. I also spent this time working alongside Year level teams to see what their focus areas would be to support this learning with my students.
As always, having this time at the start of the year to reflect on our teaching skills and creating processes to support teaching and learning in our school settings is appreciated and valuable.
Thanks to Vicki Shaver and Renee Rehfeldt for running the 2-Day workshop and providing many useful resources for us to access. Most of the resources on this blog post have come from them, including all of the Padlet resources on the link above and images from their presentation.
PD Hours: 1:00-4:00pm Presentation Time, and additional hours for creating content for this presentation, research and preparations.
Trish Tynan, an EAL/D specialist and IPSHA Network Hub President, from St Peter’s Girls School and myself, Jade Peartree, EAL/D Teacher, from St Andrew’s Primary School, have collaborated to present at the 2022, IPSHA EAL/D Collegial Group Meeting.
Please see the agenda attached below. We presented about all things EAL/D in the Independent School Sector including:
Data Collection and Assessments
Enrolment Processes for EAL/D families
The Teaching & Learning Cycle
Quality teaching and assessing using LEAP levels (Learning English: Achievement and Proficiency) and ACARA National Literacy Learning Progressions, using Moderation Benchmarks.
Sharing Digital Tools and Resources we can use with EAL/D students, including examples like Seesaw, Lexia, and Humanoid Robots.
This was my first time presenting to the EAL/D community. I have had previous experiences running professional development opportunities about digital technologies but this was different. I have been an EAL/D teacher since 2020, I am new to this area of teaching and learning and Trish Tynan has been my mentor for the last few years. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to collaborate with Trish and gain insights into the EAL/D profession. I have learnt a lot from Trish, especially in regards to our school processes for enrolments and the importance of data collection.
Whilst the PD itself was only 4 hours, there was a lot of behind the scenes work. Trish and I had multiple Zoom meetings to go over the content for the presentation. We created the Google Slide together and discussed the areas we would cover individually. Time was allocated to go over our own documentation, provide samples and evidence ready for the participants to view and engage with. We also set up digital files for our participants to have access to once the day was over, including assessment tools, the curriculum documents like the ACARA National Literacy Learning Progressions and the LEAP Level documents.
The experience for me was reaffirming that I am developing and building a solid EAL/D Programme within our school context. The feedback from my EAL/D colleagues was positive and supportive.
Below is the link to the LEAP Level documents which we use in the EAL/D Programme, and I have also attached the assessment tracking sheets. My next goal is to share these documents with all teaching staff at my own school. These would assist with planning, teaching and assessing for the benefit of our EAL/D students.
Professional Development Monday 16th September 2019
9:00am-3:30pm
My team and I attended this professional development today with the intention to learn, develop and build positive mindsets in our students and in our school community. Here are a few of my notes from today and the key messages I am taking back with me.
Healthy Relationships: Essential Goodness, every person is born with goodness, try to see this and harness it in every child. No one is going to learn from being constantly criticised. We build connections, see the child for who they are and their essential goodness, then build from there. Children won’t learn from people they don’t like. Developing good, trusting and healthy relationships is key.
Emotions are contagious. Be mindful of the emotions you bring to the room. Talk about this with your students, be aware of the moods we bring to the classroom.
Compassion: In moments of sadness, you are not alone. Building communities that want to care for each other. Compassion is crucial for the thread of society. Compassion starts with Self-Compassion. Self care and self forgiveness. Compassion doesn’t come naturally to everybody and this can be learnt.
What are the things that you do for yourself that make you feel good?
Empathy: It isn’t all about you! How are other people feeling? Can we care about other’s feelings and put ourselves in their shoes? We teach this by being empathetic beings ourselves, model this for our students.
App suggestion for meditation, gratification practise and set an intention for living: Buddhify: https://buddhify.com/
Taming the Inner Critic: What does our inner critic say? Is this true? How can we challenge that inner critic? Write down 5 nice things you can say about yourself. Inner Critic vs Inner Hero get into the healthy habit, don’t believe every thought that comes into your head. Reflect on your inner critic comments. Are those thoughts true, are they helpful, would you say it or think it about someone else?
Using EQ and Disagreeing Gracefully: It is hard to disagree with others, and usually when we disagree we have big emotions, so our thinking is low.
The Fixed Position: Letting go of the need to be right. Meeting people half way.
Respectful disagreements framework.
Win-win:The art of compromise.
Optimism: Rational Optimism. Try to find something good and rational. We are born with a negative bias. Brains were designed to look out for problems or dangers, the fight, flight or freeze mode. These are good indicators of how we are feeling. If you don’t feel right, it’s probably not right. Trust your gut instincts. Tune into your own feelings, are they rational or irrational feelings?
Top 3 things to be happier and more resilient:
1. Gratitude Practice
2. Identify 3 things that went well in your day/ life (This improves levels of optimism)
3. Swapping the phrase “Have to” to “Get to”. “Do we have to do this?” to “Do we get to do this?” I have to go to school today, I have to clean my room, I have to eat my dinner, I have to do my homework, I have to hang out the washing etc These are negative mindsets about our day and the jobs we need to do. But if we changed the dialogue to “I get to” then it becomes “I get to clean my room, because I have so many toys to play with, I get to eat dinner, some children don’t have food to eat, I get to do my homework because I’m lucky to receive an education, I get to hang out the washing because I have clean clothes to wear” Etc.
Being productive and capable in hardship. Children need to feel capable, because it’s the opposite of feeling insecure, less confident and hopeless. Is there anything you can do to turn this around? What actions could you take to make things right again? Moving past the victim mentality. Teaching children to think: I am hopeful, powerful and capable.
Problem Solving and Decision Making through Agency and Self-Efficacy:
Strengths. Self-Efficacy and Poise. How to weigh things up. Every time we tell our children what to do or solve their problems for them we do not allow them to wire up their thinking to solve problems for themselves. What are you going to do to solve your problem? Give them ownership, don’t jump in to solve their problem. We won’t be there to solve their problems in all situations, we need to let them feel disappointment, be upset, experience pain, so we can learn how to sit in those feelings and be okay, and then work out how we could solve or work on the problem for next time. To become a good decision maker as an adult you need to have experiences, make mistakes when they are little to learn from them.
Poise: If you are angry, upset, overwhelmed etc the BEST thing you can do is to not do or say anything at all! Wait until you are calm and can think clearly.
Group Meetings, Family Meetings, the importance of getting your group together regularly to meet and discuss how things are going. Structured and safe opportunity to catch up and discuss how your group is functioning. All groups/ families have problems, normalising this and giving everyone the opportunity to enter a discussion to address these problems. Once a week is ideal. Give children the opportunity to share their opinions and suggest ways to solve their own problems. Student voice, we all function at our best when we have a voice. The goal is to solve the problems together, we don’t solve their problems for them. Student ownership.
Challenging Feelings: Emotional regulation, in order to get good at handling your feelings you have to know yourself well and you have to be compassionate towards others. Acknowledge the feelings, name them. What is it you’re feeling? Accept that feeling. Do not resist that feeling. Key lessons to help us manage and deal with our challenging feelings: Gratitude Practice, Movement, Laughter, Music, Acts of Kindness, Watch what you watch (video games, social media, television programmes and movies that desensitise us to violence, negativity, it will leave negativity within you and decrease your empathy), Mindfulness, breathing & presence.
Wellbeing:
What can we do to help you with your wellbeing? Always ask the students what they want/ need to feel okay.
Meaning and purpose in everyday things and life. Help children to tune in to who they are, what is your purpose?
Fun for the sake of fun. Flow, knowing how to enjoy your life and lose yourself in the moment.
Choose who you spend time with, sleep, fire to wire.
Turning on your happy hormones:
Dopamine. Set small achievable goals. When we set a goal we give ourselves a sense of achievement, a reward.
Endorphins: Movement, exercise.
Oxytocin: Trust and receive trust, improve your social bonds.
Serotonin: The “one up” feeling. Have an awareness of this, self-confidence and self-esteem is impacted by this. Comparing ourselves to others and feeling we are “better” than others.
Here are a couple of videos from today I thought were worth sharing with students about their minds and acts of kindness.
Sentis: Neuroplasticity Clip: Our brains change based on our choices of behaviour and what we feed it.
Random Acts of Kindness: Colour Your World With Kindness
Smiles are contagious. Activity 1 minute smile with a partner, try not to smile. I will be doing this with my class. I found it so challenging not to smile when someone was smiling at me. Smiling is contagious and so are our moods. Come to school with a positive mindset.
Waldorf School frowns upon the use of computers and screens within classroom environments and discourages home use.
I had to go back and check the dates of this article and was amazed that this was only written in 2011… if you read the article you would understand my confusion.
The article goes on to explain that children do not need computers in education, instead this school is “focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans”.
My experience is polar opposite to this mindset.
Other points to note in summary of this article:
The debate comes down to subjectivity, parental choice and a difference of opinion over a single word: engagement.
Advocates for equipping schools with technology say computers can hold students’ attention and, in fact, that young people who have been weaned on electronic devices will not tune in without them.
“Teaching is a human experience,” he said. “Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”
And where advocates for stocking classrooms with technology say children need computer time to compete in the modern world, Waldorf parents counter: what’s the rush, given how easy it is to pick up those skills?
My thoughts on these points:
The word engagement is key. Student engagement should not be centred around the use of technology. I believe hands on, visual and human based interactions in learning are of the upmost importance. Technology should be used to enhance the learning experience, using the tech is not the learning experience. We are not teaching technology for the sake of the tools, we are using technology to support the learning process. If we are just using the technology for the sake of learning about a new tool we need to seriously rethink our approaches to teaching and learning.
The whole notion of working with children who have been raised with a dependence on electronic devices to maintain attention and engagement is frankly a scary thought! I believe that balance with devices is important and children require boundaries with the amount of screen time they have day to day. It seems that it has become socially acceptable/ tolerated for people to look at their devices at ‘inappropriate’ times, adults are just as guilty of this offence as children. What happened to the good old days of eye contact and having a lunch with a friend, or listening in a staff meeting, a friendly interaction at the grocery store with the checkout attendant, without the interruption of a mobile phone notification? I’m thinking that people need to be taught digital manners as well as digital citizenship! Working in Junior Primary I’m constantly reminding and supporting children with eye contact, body language cues, reading people’s reactions, emotions and expressions. Look up and engage with others around you! There is no need to use a device to engage a student, sometimes the tech does that but it is not the reason we use it.
Human interactions are of vital importance. We are more capable of connecting and collaborating with people from all around the world than ever before. We can learn from others, critically reflect on content that we are sharing and question how we could solve problems. Critical thinking and problem solving is a big part of digital interactions. We can do this in person, face to face and we can also do this digitally. Some children are better at communicating online than in person, I personally find that I’m a better communicator whilst online too! Not that I don’t enjoy speaking with people, it’s simply that I’m capable of clearly communicating my points of view after reflection and consideration whilst typing on my blog rather than in real time conversation. I’m a slow processor and appreciate time to think things over before expressing my opinion.
Lastly, just how easy is it to pick up computer and digital technology skills? If you isolate a student from using a computer and then introduce it to them at a later stage in their development they won’t simply pick it up and know what to do with it. We learnt about the phrase ‘Digital Natives’ during our workshop today, please visit the podcast and article: http://podcast.concordiashanghai.org/blog/2014/11/17/tech-talk-roundtable-72-digital-natives-use-digital-spears/
Students are not born with tech knowledge and they need to be taught how to navigate through a digital world. So much of what they will need in their lives revolves around being a digital citizen and learning the skills required to collaborate, create and critically analyse things that are online.
Another great video to watch after todays session to get this point across:
Enjoyed the reading and looking forward to sharing this post for further discussion in tomorrow’s workshop.
A year ago I stood in front of a packed room with some pretty influential and successful educators who knew their stuff when it came to successful technology integration.
I was nervous but felt some comfort in presenting with my colleagues (Paul Huebl @paulhuebl and Andy Peartree @anderspearz) about the implementation of our 1:1 iPad program in Year 6 2014.
A lot has changed in my teaching life since presenting at the Australian Computers in Education Conference (ACEC) in 2014. I no longer work in a 1:1 iPad environment, but am able to borrow laptops and sets of iPads to work with my class. I switched from upper primary to junior primary. This was a big change and I found myself taking a step back from the use of technology, I was using it everyday in a 1:1 class but now I book the appropriate tech tools for intentional lessons to suit my learners. I have gradually skilled up my students with certain applications and their confidence and enthusiasm has developed. I am rather pleased with the work they have provided and the skills they have learnt at such a young age.
This year I have started trialling a digital portfolio for my students using Seesaw. I’m leading my colleagues in an action plan to get digital portfolios implemented across the school by 2016. So far my parents have provided me with lots of positive feedback, but we will also be looking at other options. Stay tuned, looks like another blog post in the near future.
Anyway, the main reason I started this post was because I realised I hadn’t recorded this achievement, one which I was most proud of and felt a great sense of accomplishment. You see, I’m not comfortable with public speaking, in fact I would prefer to speak in front of a class full of children, they are far less intimidating than a room full of teachers and professionals in the field. However, I realised the importance of sharing one’s experiences to help others and share the knowledge. Our implementation of the 1:1 iPad program in 2014 was a great success and a challenge, which we took in our stride. I spoke at the Adelaide Convention Centre at a National conference in front of my people, the tech integrators, the guru’s, the passionate educators of the 21st Century. Awesome!
Here is a photo of us with some of our students who came to the event to showcase their learning and share what we did at our school and why they loved our way of learning in a 1:1 environment. Attached below is the Powerpoint presentation we used at the conference.
For the last two years my team and I have been developing a Middle Years Programme (MYP) unit of inquiry in Language & Literature based on the novel and film “Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence” by Doris Pilkington and directed by Phillip Noyce.
I was introduced to this inquiry unit by my colleague Andy Peartree (http://anderspearz.edublogs.org/) who had historically taught this unit to Year 6’s in previous years. Paul Huebl and myself enjoyed team teaching this unit in 2013, but this year I have been teaching the subject to all students across the year level on my own.
I have adapted the unit and made some changes and thought it was worth sharing with others. I have attached the following documents:
Within this unit we have been exploring the MYP Statement of Inquiry: Films and novels convey the same message to an audience.
We have been comparing different texts to see if the same messages can be conveyed. I have used the film and novel, “Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence” and the picture book, “The Rabbits” by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, to see if the theme and messages about the Stolen Generations were conveyed similarly and which medium was the most powerful.
We have had some pretty amazing and powerful reactions from students, especially after watching the film and looking at the following clip to anaylse the director’s work about the abduction scene:
My students are now in the process of analysing the film, doing guided reading sessions and making text connections with “The Rabbits” by John Marsden and Shaun Tan.
The final assessment and response to this unit will be a written piece (comparative essay) responding to the following questions:
Did the novel or film communicate the story “The Rabbit Proof Fence” better? Why?
Compare the ways the film and the novel explore your chosen theme.
Explain why you think that one communicated the theme better than the other.
This is the first essay my Year 6 students have written so quite a bit of scaffolding has been required. I’m looking forward to reading their completed responses and final reflections about the inquiry statement after this assignment.
Staff meeting today focussed on reading, analysing and interpreting the data from our year level, specifically focussing on Year 6 Reading Comprehension Strategies.
We compared TORCH results with one of our own school diagnostic assessments. There were some interesting discrepancies and we discussed comparing NAPLAN results with these to provide further clarity.
I sent out a request on Twitter to see if like-minded professionals could recommend a better diagnostic tool for us in Year 6. If you could suggest some please comment below.
I will speak with my colleagues, Paul Huebl http://paulhuebl.com/ and Andy Peartree http://anderspearz.edublogs.org/ to break this down further and create our year level SMART Goal in relation to how we are going to improve targeted student’s reading comprehension strategies and build on their skills.
At the end of this weeks staff meeting we looked at a process of self-reflection shared with me by Mary Hudson via Janet Farrall https://twitter.com/JanetFarrall
The process is called NESW Reflections:
N is Need to Know
E is what am I Excited about?
S is Suggestions for the future
W is what is Worrisome?
Here is a photo of my NESW from our staff meeting today:
This is an ongoing process and hopefully we can make a difference by taking the data we have collected to make informed decisions about our teaching practices to improve student skills and understanding.
Alignment with AITSL Standards: 1.5, 3.2, 3.6, 5.4, 5.5