Tania's Professional Learning Blog

This is my case study of 2 of my New Entrant/Year 1 students after 10 weeks of the BSLA program.  Before the program was started I did a baseline assessment and after 10 weeks around 40 lessons I completed an assessment.  This is what I found comparing the data collected and compared between the baseline and 10 weeks assessments.  Child A Was proficient in phoneme identity at baseline assessment.  Has good sound knowledge of phonemes and could recognise both the letters and their sounds. Below proficiency in all other areas of the baseline data which included segmentation and manipulation of letter sounds, phoneme blending.   At week 10 assessment, child A has made consistent progression in all areas, especially the non-word reading of graphemes. Next Steps: Continue to solidify knowledge and build confidence in both whole class and small group BSLA activities. Moving onto the next stage of BSLA from week 11. Child B: Started school with little phoneme and ...

In class, we share exciting storybooks that will help grow the number of new and interesting words that your children can use and understand when talking. The words are not every day used words, they are more complex to extend vocabulary usage when speaking. We also focus on 2 Maori words per book.  I like these story books because they are relevant and students understand the content. Here is an example of a book and the vocabulary we focus on. We are also focussing on critical thinking and have extended discussion about the book. We read one book per week to really solidify the vocabulary and the students are able to retell the story.  Here is an example of making the learning visible in the classroom: Don't know which book is my favourite!!

This is my new favourite activity to do with my class. They are engaged and really show improvement in the sentence structure, formulating a sentence orally and confidence. What is Colourful Semantics? Colourful semantics is an approach created by Alison Bryan. It is aimed at helping students to develop their grammar but it is rooted in the meaning of words (semantics). Colourful semantics reassembles sentences by cutting them up into their thematic roles and then colour codes them. The approach has 4 key colour coded stages. There are further stages for adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions and negatives. Pictures are also used to help construct the sentences and they are also colour coded to match the above. For example: WHO – Orange WHAT DOING – Yellow WHAT – Green WHERE – Blue The approach is used in stages and helps students develop language and vocabulary in addition to grammatical structure. It can be used to help students who are starting to develop language and have limited vocabu...

Phonemic awareness is essential in teaching students to be automatic decoders of print. The Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum provides students with consistent and repeated instruction, and this transfers to developing a student’s decoding and encoding skills. All students participate in the lessons as part of the Tier 1 curriculum. As they grow more confident they may still be developing phonemic awareness skills and may benefit from instruction in the areas of blending segmenting, substituting, and deleting phonemes. The lessons are designed to provide daily instruction in eight phonological and phonemic awareness skills. Students practice blending, segmenting, and manipulating words, syllables, and phonemes each day. Most literacy curriculum currently available places minimal focus on phonemic awareness, only practicing one to two skills each day. The two best predictors of early reading success are alphabet recognition and phonemic awareness. (Adams, 1990) With this program, s...

It's Workshop time !!  How fortunate are we to come together and share expertise and learn from each other.  This was ass always a FUN experience! This year we decided to make a collaborative team workshop. In our syndicate we had an amazing experience celebrating Samoan Language Week and decided that we would love to share the learning that happened with the rest of our cluster. Four brave and confident tamariki acted as MCs and led the show!! Very proud teachers. 

Different Learning spaces and their meanings   - TKI website 3 types of terms for the learning spaces and their purpose: one to self learning environment - they can go and work by themselves - "the cave" campfire - one to many (guru/teacher) talking(guided groups) watering hole - everyone to everyone(combining all together) - bounce ideas off each other/problem solving/move around and find solutions It can function as an intellectual space as well as an emotional space Develop a collaborative learning   environment  - TKI website Kids need to have a voice in the environment - create their space they want to work in. They talk about the spaces that they like to learn best in. Spaces that are up high, down low, individual, collaborative spaces, or our whole class learning space. It involves moving towards self-directed learning meaning that the children use the tools around them and the spaces around them to achieve their own goals in their learning. Innovative learning in ...

Moving into an Innovative Learning Environment can be very overwhelming and scary. But as I look back at our syndicate and team members and what we have achieved during the pandemic and everything we had to adapt to and reinvent or change to make it work - we are AMAZING!!! We had to quickly adjust our planning to make it user friendly for the students at school as well as students that are isolating at home and feeling up to it to do learning, hence HYBRID learning. At the time we didn't realise that it was just the beginning of our ILE journey.  Take aways from Hybrid Learning: Importance of TRUST in a team Importance of COLLABORATION in a team Importance of COMPROMISE in the team Work with each others' STRENGTHS Being able to LISTEN to advise and change where applicable Our Hybrid Learning model soon became our normal planning and it is great to see the passion getting back into the teachers' eyes, not spending hours over a weekend doing planning by yourself. We also sta...

 New/Old ways of filling the gaps With my New Entrants starting school this year I soon realised that there was a big gap in their foundational skills and Oral language. This is concerning because the students need to have some alphabet letter and sound knowledge to start with reading and writing. They should be able to recognise their name and have basic number knowledge too.  With the isolation periods for most of the children the start was not perfect and they had to adapt to school all over again. We adjusted our teaching plan and focused on doing a lot of just hands on activities, which includes fine and gross motor activities, to build their phonological knowledge and number skills. Even though we didn't do a lot of structured learning as such because of numbers and teachers isolation it gave us the chance to get to know the children and their needs well enough to form a perfect plan starting Term 2. We would have filled most the gaps and hope to start a proper more stru...

Starting school at five can be an exciting and nervous time for both children and their families, especially during these uncertain times we are currently teaching under.  For New Entrants my goal is to firmly establish the key skills required for literacy and numeracy success, and to build upon the work parents and your ECE/Kindergartens have begun. We know all children are different and I structure my New Entrant programme to cater to each individual child’s needs. For this first part of the year it is all about building relationships with both the children and the parents. Making sure that they are having fun and want to return to school the next day!! I have a couple of really boisterous boys and they just love being outside - I was lucky enough to capture one conversation they had and this was truely eye opening to me. Just the way they were communicating with each other to build their treehouse.  This made me more aware on how I need to take my learning outside and reall...