I have learnt sooo much as part of my MSSD training this year but have not had as many opportunities to share the knowledge as I would have liked.  So I will use this space as a way to communicate some of the key learnings – hopefully you may find some of it useful.

I will begin with UDL (not the drinking kind!)

There are things that you need  in your classroom in preparation for the Reading and Writing Workshop. At St Thomas’ we run our workshops in Middles and Seniors based on the Deb Sukarna  model.  We have all agreed that this model works best for us and allows us to truly personalise  the learning and at the same time the structure allows us to target individual needs efficiently without ‘going nuts!!” Remember that much of first term is devoted to establishing routines.  Time spent well here will enable children to be independent to allow the workshops to run at optimum efficiency for the rest of the year.  I would STRONGLY encourage you to attend some of the PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT  on offer to hear it from the “Horses Mouth!” The sad part is that this PD is on a Saturday – VERY SAD. The good part is there are lots of nice coffee shops to visit close by and I promise it will be the most practical and useful PD you will attend!

Visit the WRITERS WORKSHOP page for some tips on getting started.

We are always  alluding to the perfect classroom and last year I created the fantasy teacher – Miss Prunella Perfecture as a bit of fun.  I thought the following excerpt might be useful in setting up your classroom at the beginning of the school year.  It is a bit of an overview as to what your classroom should contain by way of books. It is aimed at middles and seniors but may also useful for Prep-2.  I will add more over the following days. Don’t want to overwhelm you !!

CORE LIBRARY

 Prunella  has a collection of books collected by her over the years, salvaged from Library culls or given to her by retiring teachers or collected from children’s own unwanted home supplies, or from her own grown up children.   This core library stays the same  and each term she tops it up with books from her school’s library and with books pertaining to her Inquiry for the term.   This core  Library is organised into interest tubs e.g. Scary books, Funny Books, Mysteries, Non- Fiction, Quick and Easy Reads , Kids own favourites (from Home) Magazines (comets etc..) Poetry Books, Author Boxes.

These books are single copies and available for kids to read during the independent reading section of the Reading Workshop or ‘Reading Bubble” .

LEVELLED READERS

At the beginning of the year many of her Year Three children are reading levelled readers and she gets these from the junior grades – she makes up special boxes for these kids with the levelled readers and some carefully chosen easy to read but high interest books to maintain the self efficacy of these children.

BOOK CLUB BOOKS

Miss Prunella Perfecture’s Literacy Leader Ms  Fantasticture (tee hee!) is also Perfect and the school has a large supply of good quality sets of books (mainly fiction) for Book Club use –these are in sets of at least six .  They also have good quality titles loaded onto the class ipads.   There are plenty of books for her children to choose from for their Bookclub.  (note: we will get this done in the first few weeks of term.)

GUIDED READING TEXTS

Miss Prunella and her Literacy Leader Extraordinaire have found that buying guided readers has become an expensive and not all that useful.  These sets of books become outdated very quickly, may not be related to the particular topic , interests or needs of the children in the group.  So while they do have a limited number of Guided Readers, Multimodal texts have become a large part of Miss Prunella’s Teaching material and she has access to a number of excellent blogs, websites and tools including The Literacy Shed. She will often use her set of  ipads to allow each child to have access to ‘the text’.   She also recognises the need for children to read continuous texts.  She is able to find enough good quality material in her core library – and will often photocopy a chapter or excerpt of a suitable book, a newspaper article, children’s magazines such as Comet, Explore etc..  for use in Guided Reading.  She also has access to previous NAPLAN magazines which are the perfect length text for a guided reading session.  In fact in first term her Literacy Leader insists that teachers use NAPLAN booklets for guided reading – the texts are short , sharp and well targeted and it provides children with practise in the genre of the NAPLAN format so they can ‘show what they know’ when it comes to NAPLAN. We also have purchased recently Fountas and Pinnell Levelled Literacy Intervention that can but used as a guided reading programme if ‘pull out’ intervention in unavailable. See Post about this.

Reflections of a Reading Recovery Teacher on Oral Language……..

One of the most important lessons that I have learnt from my Reading Recovery Training is the importance of “conversations”.

That for me is one of the greatest privileges of having the opportunity to teach children one on one in a safe , quiet environment.

But I had to learn this – teachers (and parents) are so used to questioning (and in my case as a parent –lecturing) that we rarely stop and have a genuine conversation.

Children need to have genuine conversations with a  more competent  English speaker than themselves  – often.

In working families lives are very busy.  I know in my family at night when the children were small, there were many nights when the conversations could consist of “ have a bath, eat your dinner, do your homework, clean your teeth, go to bed , goodnight , I love you”

As a child I remember sitting around the laminex  dinner table (I love that table!! Where is it now?) for a long time after dinner had finished and the family would talk, talk, talk – lots and lots of politics, family gossip, family stories – often the same ones over and over again. Both my parents were storytellers.  I take great joy in sharing these stories with the  children at St T’s and hopefully encourage them to be story tellers too.  Our brain is a ‘narrative brain’ and we learn best through stories. These stories are how we keep previous generations alive. It’s often how we teach children our values.  Now I have regressed from conversations to story telling – egads! Two very different types of oral language –  but both are important for different reasons.

Found this little video on Twitter (yay!).  A really lovely example of a little writer not afraid to take risks to express himself. Kindergarten children are more likely to say they can write before they say they can read (according to David Hornsby).

Globalword  is a fantastice resource for teachers of  Literacy. It  has been put together by PEETA and World Vision. If you are planning a unit of work around Sustainability, Indigineous studies, Asian Perspectives (who isn’t) then this webite has done all the work and more. It is a very good example of an authentic integrated curriculum.  I think you may have to be a PEETA member to have free access.

This clip that must be very old and contains NOTHING about ICT but I often use with teachers returning to the classroom.  It is the lovely Candice Bookman who must be much older now and perhaps has a blog of her own ( haven’t found it yet).  Good practices and structures never go out of style and hers works – the centres she talks of are still relevent but we now have a greater variety of tools to choose from.

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