Domain: Professional Practice
Standard three: Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.
Specifically: 3.4 Select and use resources and 3.7 Engage parents and carers in the educative process
Literacy was the area I wished to begin focusing on first in my initial planning stages as I felt I could tie in SOSE and improve parts of maths solving word problems if the students literacy was improved. I began my plan from a concept diagram as I do all my subjects then move into a term plan, then week by week. The focus of this commentary is the Literacy rotations.
As the school plan in Literacy was to implement guided reading groups, I suggested that introduce Literacy rotations to the class, my mentor was happy for me to instigate and plan this for the term. Students were in numbered groups of 5-6 based on their reading ability.
There were six different rotations that were completed over a fortnightly basis through out the term. Each rotation was marked clearly with Independent practice, Work in Pairs; work in a group with the teacher. Each activity was explained at the beginning of the fortnight and then at the end of each lesson one student from each group would form a plenary and advise what activity they had completed for the day, this allowed other students to learn what was required if they needed extra help. The activities were broken into specific literacy tasks, including cross-curricular and ICT.
Rotation one: Novel based independent working, it would relate to the chapter we had read in the class novel: Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson it could be a Venn diagram for compare and contrast, rewriting a scene from the book, or a worksheet to acknowledge how well they interpreted that chapter.
Rotation two: Guided reading with the teacher, we sat in a reading circle and each student read aloud, with my focus being how they read, chunking, sounding out and adjusting reading rates. (Anecdotal records were taken at this time.) Then they would need to complete a small written or visual task for five minutes. The text chosen was “Tan Le” based on our SOSE unit of immigration.
Rotation three: comprehension, a specific text was given to the students to read and then answer questions based on their inferential learning. I chose texts from the SOSE literature from the “Our Voices” resource pack that the school had. In particular the People theme explores the first Australians and the millions of migrants who have come to call Australia home.
Rotation four: Listening post Computer based, I am a keen user of “TED Ed” which is a platform for presentations, so I put links on to the class intranet of different presentations from TED or you tube for the poetry slam and I had the students listen/watch them and then answer some questions based on their interpretation.
Rotation five: Grammar and Punctuation Focus, Each Monday there was an explicit lesson a Grammar or punctuation focus for that week and this rotation would back that up, by giving students a worksheet to practice what they learned. Most worksheets came from my own library of resource books or from websites.
Rotation six: Book Discussion groups; Each group would spend 15 minutes reading their allocated reading level text, then take a role of the reader and spend 10 minutes working on that role for presenting it within their group at a different lesson during that fortnight.
I found by providing different texts and many varied resources, the students were never bored of this activity, and although it was time consuming to set up originally, it enabled students to work independently, which was a great situation for me to manage behaviour as well as listen to my small group for guided reading.
My mentor liked this program so much she is continuing with it this term.During my professional practice I was able to communicate with the parents many times, beginning with my introduction letter, which states our plan for the term. as we had our learning journey night, where students invited the parents to the class and showed off their work. The students were asked to point out five pieces of work and show what they did and what the liked about and they would like to learn more about, this then encouraged a dialogue between student and parent.
We also had a morning Numeracy lesson where we invited parents to come into the room and their child acted as their teacher and taught them a mental maths strategy that we worked on that week. The both parents and students enjoyed the morning and I received many thanks on the day as well as a written note.
A daily communication book is required for the student with special needs and as the EA did not work on a Friday, this became my responsibility. I was really impressed with the student and the mentor role they played in our slam poetry lesson that required students to create a power point presentation. I wrote in the communication book and gave this student a merit certificate for such a great effort.
ActionPlan
I will definitely use Rotation groups in my literacy units in the future and will have my resources linked to the overall theme for the term. I would like to complete some professional development on how to increase my students reading ability. While a volunteer at a local school I have been exposed to the Toe by Toe reading program, yet I understand that each school has their own program to help along readers and when I receive a school placement I will be keen to undertake professional development on their chosen program. Over the January school holidays I plan to practice running records for reading with my ten year old to gain experience.
By the end of 2013 I plan to complete both of these online self paced courses available through the department “Reporting to Parents” and “Records Awareness Training- Record keeping”, to enhance my knowledge base for administration procedures in my teaching role.
