Celebrating the win...

This week the words I heard in our class speech competition completely stopped me in my tracks. Standing in front of an audience of their peers was every member of my reading groups confidently used the vocabulary we have encountered, unpacked and explored throughout our Reading units this year in context. Gone were the usual go-to's and in their place was a plethora of sophisticated vocabulary. This is a win in every sense of the word! 

To give my last sentence some context, the previous week I had taught an explicit lesson on speech writing. This lesson contained exemplars at a variety of e-asTTle writing levels. That meant my learners were exposed to a healthy mix of simple and more powerful vocabulary. One of our challenges involved applying our knowledge language features to edit an exemplar and move it to the next level. This is where my students very sound understanding of the more powerful vocabulary needed came to the fore. This then lead to a rich discussion as each group discussed their vocabulary choices and explained why they had made these changes. We applied the same strategy to levelling up the structural features.

Unfortunately the next few days saw me off sick, which meant my learners were left to work independently on their own speeches. I did share explicit instructions via email but knew these students would be working without guided teacher support. The comments tool in Google docs definitely gets a shout out here. I shared my feedback and left them to it. Move forward to today. I saw and heard the outcome of explicit teaching, creative ways of helping my learners connect to new and powerful vocabulary and a year long focus on affixes in action. 

My next step is to record some of these speeches that will be uploaded here so that I have a permanent record of what success looks like.

T Shaped Literacy Unit 2 - Representation...

This T shaped literacy unit focused on representations in a text. Our students asked if we could do this unit as a whole class so we listened. I lead the sessions and was able to incorporate differentiation with Dianne reinforcing the learning with her groups. The only time we separated was for the introduction of the content specific vocabulary. I have discussed my word gifting strategy in an earlier post. This meant once again we were able to be creative and strengthen our own teaching styles. 

We began by introducing the vocabulary to give our tauira the resources they needed to help them unpack and make sense of the new learning. Our next step was to revisit the learning from the Characterisation unit before we built our own connections to the topic of representation by drawing on our prior knowledge and personal biases when looking at how scientists are depicted in a wide variety of texts. We then looked at well known scientists and concluded that our biases clouded our judgements.

Our topic this time was Superheroes. I chose comics as the text type and selected pre 1980 Spiderman, Superman, Batman and their female counterparts to help us compare and contrast the gender bias that was reflected a representation of the time. I chose the comics from this time as the later ones explore issues that would not be suitable for all my learners. As with my other T shaped units I chose to collate all my lessons in one DLO so that everything was easy to find and easy to access for both myself and my learners. The presentation below has the links to all teaching points, texts used, follow up tasks and student responses.

The DLOs below reflect the student responses and show their strong connections to the topic and content specific vocabulary. What they don't show however, is the rich discussions that took place as each concept was explored and unpacked.

Listening to my Learners...

Collecting student voice is one of the most powerful forms of feedback. As the strategy of word gifting was new for us I wanted to see if my thoughts aligned with the thoughts of my learners. To capture this I shared a Google form with the students in my reading groups. The slides reflect the responses.

The questions I asked were:

• What did you like about the vocabulary gifting in Reading?
• What might you do differently to get to know the new words in Reading?
• How did this help you in the Representation topic?

Implement and Try#2: Word Gifting...

I have been approaching my inquiry into word consciousness as a whole language focus and not simply looking for opportunities to strengthen spelling skills. This term I have actively planned for opportunities to adopt the word gifting strategy that Sylvia Ashton-Warner used to elicit key vocabulary. 

Making Reading Meaningful - Sylvia Ashton-Warner and the Language Experience Approach by Sherron Killingsworth Roberts points out that by embracing some of the guiding principles for practice of Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s work in developing the Language Experience Approach (LEA) we can strengthen the connections our tauira have to the more challenging topic based vocabulary needed to make sense of new learning. The principle that resonates most with me is to offer ongoing, authentic language and literacy experiences, including lots of opportunities to speak, listen, read, write, and think about their own and others’ words.

In my reading program this term I have been focusing on the concept of representation in texts. This unit was designed as part of the T-Shaped literacy PLD that I have been on with the University of Auckland for the past two years. In each unit there is a vocabulary component that we up until now have unpacked as a class. This time around I decided to make a few changes, with the most powerful change being to gift the content specific vocabulary to my learners. 

The first thing I did was to create a list of the words and their definitions. These were then cut up and placed face down in front of the groups. After everyone physically selected their card the next challenge was to find the their partner by matching the word to its meaning. We needed to establish ownership of these words so the challenge to use their specific words twice each reading lesson was laid down. To ensure this happened my learners were asked to bring their word to every time we had reading. These word cards were not pretty or laminated but became a part of every reading lesson as along with ownership came a sense of responsibility.

No one immediately connects to a word so each pair was given the challenge of introducing their word to us. The details of the challenge are on the slide below.

What I found was that strong connections were made by the owners of these words. This was evident in reading responses, extended discussions and questions asked. What I wasn't expecting was that every student in the group could use every word accurately and in context. The example below from team 1 shows how these words were used in context accurately and effectively.

With the success I found in reading using this strategy, I decided to transfer this challenge to our science inquiry. Again, ownership meant connections and connections meant explanations of experiment outcomes were explicit. This is definitely an activity I would use again as it was unique, purposeful and fun.