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!!