Mia's Teaching Journey

After an amazing break travelling through Vietnam it is great to be back at work. I am really enjoying teaching my new level year 3 and I have an amazing class of beautiful tamariki. I am only in my room until the 2nd of June (week 5 of Term 2), as Laura Nalder will be returning for the rest of the year after her study leave. Taking this into consideration I want to focus my inquiry around something I can hopefully come to some sort of resolution for/ conclusion by end of this term.  Although I haven’t done much maths in this first two weeks yet due to various time constraints and other things such as swimming etc taking up a big deal of time I have already noticed that a lack of knowledge is holding most of my children back and teaching them strategies seems to be a waste of time? Well perhaps not a waste but it seems like I am actually going back to teaching the knowledge because they don’t have what they need to work out the strategy.  I need to investigate ways to b...

I have basically achieved my goals of getting my children to 1) Have a go at writing independently 2) Find HFWs on the blue card 3) Attempt unknown words by recording initial sounds and recording them. Due to the big focus on the basics I feel my top writers have missed out - now that the rest of the class has gained the skills they need I need to look at where to next → Essentially for my bottom bottom writers I am going to continue on with what I was doing in term 1 - they still need lots of HF words work - 4 of them are in RR so they are getting extra help this. FOCUS FOR THE REST OF CLASS: Get them to think about their AUDIENCE - how can they make their writing more interesting? Model adding in adjectives - haven’t spoken at all about these this year so will need to introduce this and talk about adding detail. They have got the sentence structure and basic skills they now need - so to sum up my Term 3 aim it is to create ‘Juicier Writing’.

Term 2: Reflecting on last terms inquiry; looking into improving my student's writing - I would like to continue on the same path this term. My priority learners will be experiencing what I like to call a 'Blue Butterfly Card Blitz'. I will be focusing on teaching my learners how to use the card by: recognising and reading the HF words on it. Looking at the year 2 writing exemplars I notice that to be at there is huge jump is the vocabulary that they are expected to be using. I will be looking at ways that I can enrich my children's vocabulary in writing. I plan to do this by: Reading to the class at least twice a day. Gifting more words to the children during guided writing time.