Case Study BSLA - 10 Weeks of teaching

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.

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Child B:

• Started school with little phoneme and letter sound recognition and knowledge.

• Was below proficiency in all areas of the baseline data which included phoneme knowledge, phoneme blending, segmentation and manipulation.

• At week 10 assessment, child B has made progress in all areas, especially the non-word reading of graphemes.

Next Steps:

Continue to build competence and confidence in the segmentation of sounds and and decoding strategies - aiding in the ability to read any given word and manipulation strategies with a more intensive focus on phoneme awareness

How did I differentiate my teaching methods to assist my focus students:

• Ensuring that I had smaller groups made it easier to see who was mastering the lesson goals and skills acquired to move on.  Students that were struggling to learn and retain the new phonemes that were being introduced, I placed into another group where I could be more explicit in my teaching of phonemes, segmentation and decoding. 

• Hands on and digital rotation activities were set up for the students during our literacy block that related to the oral language, CVC words, and phonemes that were being explicitly taught in both whole class and small group activities.

• Weekly handouts and optional homework was sent home that correspond with the learning happening within the class for each group, in hopes that it would aide in the solidifying of the learners phoneme knowledge. 

• Creating a word wall with both the shared reading book covers and the key vocabulary. This made the key vocab not only continuously accessible but also made the learning rewindable as I would point to a book cover and have the learners take turns to retell the story, and what the words meant.  This built confidence for both my focus students in their oral language and comprehension of what we had read. 

• Due to COVID we did not get to meet with the whanau at the beginning of the year as we had initially planned. Whanau were invited to a BSLA information meeting at the end of term 2.  In some ways, I think this worked in our favour, as we had a better understanding of the approach and could share the learning and progress we had seen so far.  We had a great turnout of parents who seemed very interested and happy for their children to be a part of the structured literacy approach that we were implementing. 

I have enjoyed participating in and implementing the BSLA into my literacy practice.

As a syndicate, we grouped our learners based on what their baseline data showed.  Some of my learners made significant progress meaning they moved into another group.  I was explicit in my teaching however the challenges of student absences and whānau engagement have impacted how the rest of my group has progressed within the approach.

I am looking forward to taking what I have learned and accomplished this year using the BSLA approach and incorporating it with other structured literacy approaches, such as the Code and the Heggerty program to provide a literacy program that meets and supports all learner's literacy needs and abilities. 

 

How did I engage my students and kept them engaged?

Knowledge of the learner's capacity and scaffolding to the next step apparently all the way through
Individual students supported / differentiation provided
Explicit teaching is evident all the way through
The lesson flowed well despite children not having this delivered to them consistently due to absences etc.
Resources all organised and all elements of the BSLA lesson were incorporated.

Some of my students will be doing Tier 2 of the program. They need a lot more reinforcement of their phonetic knowledge. Tier 2 is much more focussed and deliberate teaching.

Here are some activities I included into my Literacy Program:
Lots of follow up and reinforcement in activities
Lots of vocabulary unpacking with the Shared Reading book
Explanations stepped through as began activity
Continual feedback and prompting for next step
Good flow and pace to keep engagement

Building vocabulary and oral language through shared reading

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!!

Building Oral Language and Sentence structure

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:

1. WHO – Orange
2. WHAT DOING – Yellow
3. WHAT – Green
4. 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 vocabulary to confident talkers who struggle to organise the grammatical content of their sentences.

Who can use Colourful Semantics?

The approach can be used with students with a range of Speech, Language and Communication Needs including:

• Specific Language Impairment
• Developmental Delay or Disorder
• Autistic Spectrum Condition
• Literacy difficulties

Why use Colourful Semantics?

There are a range of benefits to using this approach, including but not limited to;

• Encouraging wider vocabulary
• Making sentences longer
• Helps students to answer questions or generate responses to questions
• Developing use of nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives
• Improves story telling skills
• Can be transferred to written sentences and written language comprehension
• Can be carried out individually or in small groups(up to 3)

Gives students access to a rich set of tools for thinking about language. Students learn to recognise common patterns in sentence construction and then discover how these patterns relate to real life situations. As well as helping students to become fluent communicators, this process teaches them important concepts such as:

• How words combine into phrases and sentences

• What makes up a complete thought

• How different types of word order affect meaning

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colourful semantics structure

 

Colourful semantics helps children understand the structure of sentences. It can be used to colour code and identify grammatical structures. This approach acts as a code helping students to process the otherwise invisible details in sentences. Our block building process can be used to help students play with structure and develop complete sentences. Because students are using a playful tool, the building blocks, the structure can be manipulated multiple times until the students creates the correct sentence. This encourages students to try out new ideas and not be so worried about 'being wrong'. The incremental nature of using building blocks means that students can develop a three part sentence or four part sentence and gradually increase the complexity. Getting the foundations for sentence production right using a colour coding approach builds confidence and autonomy.

How can colourful semantics develop expressive language skills? 

You may well have children in your class with a developmental language disorder. Language development in children who struggle with speech sounds and/or vocabulary, is characterised by poor use of syntax and morphology, difficulty producing meaningful utterances, and difficulties comprehending others' messages. Children with phonological disorders tend to produce short, ungrammatical utterances which lack cohesion. They also make frequent errors involving sound-symbol correspondences. Language impairments in children are common. Children with specific language impairment usually display delays in acquiring basic linguistic abilities. In order to succeed in school children need to develop a certain level of academic language proficiency. Children with language difficulties find it difficult to express themselves clearly and coherently. This makes them less likely to participate fully in classroom discussions and more prone to making mistakes.

Fun and Engaging Heggerty Phonemic Awareness program

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, students receive daily practice in both. This explicit instruction scaffolds support for students to work with early, basic and advanced phonemic awareness skills. With daily lessons, students are able to build the necessary foundation to become automatic decoders of print.

The instruction provided throughout the daily lessons can be customised to meet the individual needs of each learner. Teachers can provide support for students through teacher modeling and kinesthetic hand motions and the students stay engaged.

Students who excel can be challenged with advanced phonemic awareness activities that focus on deleting and substituting phonemes, which will help them add new multi‐syllabic words to their sight vocabulary.

Students who have limited proficiency with the English language may benefit from phonemic awareness instruction in their native language. The focus of the lessons is on isolating sounds, blending sounds into words, and manipulating sounds, rather than vocabulary development.

Students can receive explicit instruction in sounds when working with an teacher assistant for additional support. This may be in addition to the instruction that is provided within the classroom. The teacher assistant can provide targeted instruction for specific skills and an intervention lesson may last around 5-7 minutes.

Studies have shown that phonemic awareness is a foundational skill, essential for learning to read. As students learn to identify sounds through oral and auditory activities, they become phonemically aware. Engaging in phonemic awareness instruction develops students’ understanding of sounds, and that knowledge directly impacts their spelling and writing.

First of all, you will want to take a look at what it is.  You can download sample lesson plans on their website at this link.  They have uploaded a sample plans.  (I've been using this Pre-K book with my Transitional New Entrants.) There are also plans from the Kindergarten book and the Primary book. 

Start at the Beginning of the Book- (No Matter What Time of Year You Begin)

I heard about it at a professional development course around Structured Literacy and also had a chat with our RTLit teachers.
It is designed to be used DAILY and start from Week 1 - do not skip ahead to the week you are in.

Consistency is the Key

Like many skills, consistency is the key to learning phonemic awareness, and daily practice makes the difference!  I use the program consistently five days a week. It's actually quite easy to plan for! You just cross off a fifteen minute time block for the Heggerty Book Phonemic Awareness exercises, and turn the page to the next week on Fridays!  lt's an easy lesson plan, no prep habit!

Keep the Pace Up 

Once both you and the kids know the routine, the quicker you can take them through the exercises, the happier you'll all be!  It's easier to keep the kids' attention if you keep the lesson moving than if you go slowly.  The kids will get a TON of repetition on every skill, so there is no reason to dwell on each one.  

Don't Stop the Lesson Once You Start

Let your class know that you will not call on them if they have questions during the lesson.  If someone raises a hand to stop you to ask a question, just shake your head, "no," meaning, "Not right now- wait a few minutes."  My students have gotten so good at their Heggerty phonemic awareness lessons that we usually get through them in about seven minutes, not counting singing the ABC song at the beginning and the Nursery Rhyme at the end!  Below you can see an example of one of the Nursery Rhyme videos with motions that we do afterwards!

Use Consistent Hand Motions for the Exercises

The Heggerty book includes descriptions of hand motion cues to use for many of their exercises, but not all. Of course, you can always make up your own!  But I would highly suggest that you be consistent with your movements.  If you teach the kids to "punch the ending sound" one week, then stick with that unless there is a reason to change it.  And here is a tip:  

And by the way, if your kids don't know all of the letter sounds. Example of songs to do letters and sounds.

Here is an example of how the lesson plan looks like in action. 

Week 1 Day 2 Pre K program

Manaiakalani Workshop 2022

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. 

Thinking and planning to move into an Innovative Learning Environment

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 Year 0 - 2- TKI website

A very important factor to include in a Junior classroom is to explain and understand the importance of encouraging students to be self-directed learners. Crucial to have central space and then the students have some choices of areas that break out from that central area. As junior teachers we need to see where everyone is all the time. I think the children in the collaborative environment have much more choice with where they’re going to learn, how they’re going to learn.

Adapting single cell classrooms to create an innovative learning environment - TKI website

As a team we will look at some ideas and talk to SL how we can keep going and not loose momentum we have working towards a ILE team and syndicate:

Ideas so far:

• Utilise the 4 learning spaces we have and make them into learning spaces only and not classrooms assigned to teachers. Teachers will move around with a group of children each day into different learning spaces.
• Spaces will be used as a specific space e.g. Ipad and Chromebook room, Construction Room, Games room, Provocation(theme related) Free choice room
• Teachers will have a responsibility to plan for a space(classroom) and the following week plan for a different one
• The groups will rotate into each space every week
• Each Room will have Literacy and Numeracy according to the Room type e.g. Games room will provide the students when not working with the teacher to play maths or literacy games with their friends(planned by a teacher) as well as follow up activities created after the guided session.

Our syndicate is excited about our journey.

Giving students choice in their learning

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 started the BSLA(structured Literacy) approach and are working more in ability grouping with our students. Being able to have differentiation within the ability group is truly a game changer. We are also fortunate to have a new BT who can manage a "nesting class" to fill those utter most important foundational skills. 

OUR NEWEST COLLABORATIVE IDEA:

Giving students agency in what they want to learn - only rule is that they need to stick with what they have chosen for the week. The next week they can change.

Our teachers used student voice to lead us into our inquiry learning theme. The students were interest in learning more about animals.  We lead them into the animal classification table and from there they could choose which animal they are interested in. From there we created a chart according to their main interest and how we can incorporate most of their choices.

four main classification groups were identified. 

The teachers chose which category they want to do and which animal they want to focus on for the first week. The students were given the opportunity to choose and work with that teacher for the week. On a Friday we will brainstorm which animal will be the next focus and we come together as a syndicate to form our new groups. This has worked very well and the students are excited to learn about something they are really interested in. 

YOU COULD HERE A BUZZ  - and that's our job!!

Create passionate and innovative learners.

FUN and going back to basics

 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 structured literacy and Maths program next term.

On a Friday we have a big focus on exploring and developing each individual child's talents(choice activities). We will continue with this in Term 2.

We have two sessions:

First we focus on Fine motor skills activities. Each member of our team has to plan 1 activity e.g snack item, art activity, cutting, painting, play dough.

The next block we focus on Gross motor skills. Activities might include: big soft blocks and other items they can find to build their own obstacle course, sand pit with toys to play with, balls and hula hoops, basketball ring(small size), big duplo/lego blocks,  games(What's the time Mr Wolf and extending it where the students can change some features of the game), dance parties - here they can be creative and make up their own dances to their own choice of song and puppet shows.

Each week we have a different theme: This term we have Eric Carle books and a lot of learning is coming from the stories and we are also linking it in to our Key Understandings of the year: Digital Identity - In my shoes. Here are some of the activities we are doing on a Friday:

Making spiders using currants, apples, peanut butter/honey and pretzels - Yummy!! Eric Carle - The very busy spider

Play dough - we made it in class and making ladybugs - Eric Carle - The grouchy ladybug

Our favourite : Soft blocks and having a good old race.

Being creative and using the big Legos to make a robot.

Sand pit play - we love to get a little dirty without too much mess.

Free painting - inspired by the book.

We include our School Values in every lesson we teach and the students know the expectations. We love Fridays!!

2022 start with an interesting twist

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 really dig deeper into Blue Sky thinking and teaching.

Oral Language will be a BIG focus on developing good listening skills, speaking clearly and loudly for others to hear, and asking appropriate questions.

How will I make them a better speaker and me a better listener:

• Giving the students time to answer questions and encouraging them to ask questions
• Encouraging them to join in discussions and encouraging them to listen to others
• Showing them how to talk on the phone
• Showing them how to ask for help
• Telling them stories
• Encouraging them to bring an item to show and talk about during news time – eg. photos, books, insects, cultural items, own arts and crafts

Our main focus in Maths is on developing children’s understanding of number concepts. Other mathematical areas that we cover are algebra, geometry, measurement and statistics.

How will I make sure this happens:

• Encouraging them to do lots of counting in english and Te Reo
• Looking for numbers in the environment 
• Solving simple real life problems – eg. if Grandma and Granddad come for tea, how many people will we have altogether?
• Encouraging them to use counters or count using their fingers
• Encouraging them to play board games
• Asking them to say how they ‘figured it out’

Fine motor skills will be an integral part of my day to day activities - as much as possible exposure to different activities inside the class as well as outside.

Looking forward to a very successful year!!

Look at the amazing work we have done so far: