Hi Everyone,
This week's focus was on how we group students and select texts for our students.
As always, I enjoyed hearing Dorothy talk about the kaupapa and pedagogy. I really like the practical ideas that I can take away. The use of voice typing for students to transfer texts to digital texts. This term I have been starting to get students to record themselves reading, I really liked the idea of having the students save it to a media folder and being able to have that as a record of their reading and a form of formative assessment.
The discussions around the grouping of students were really interesting and made me think about how I am doing things in my class and across our hub. We tend to group based on levels or close levels but we could be looking at learning intentions or interests and finding ways to scaffold texts to help them access a larger range of texts and using AI to help create or alter texts to meet needs. This is an area I want to explore more next term. I found this slide useful in breaking down some of the considerations, and think it will be useful to go back to when considering groupings.
Over the last few years, I have done a bit around text selection and in general, I try to think about the texts I am choosing. In the past, I have played around with using supporting texts and some T-shaped literacy but it is not something I have done consistently. I think that this is going to be a goal for me next term to build up some text sets be really purposeful in those text selections and develop some consistency.
I found a lot of value in the quick stock-take activity. It was good to see that I have quite a few elements in my program and reflect on what I can do to optimize and add variety to include more variety.
I think that the next step in my team is to evaluate the elements in our reading program, find out what we are consistently doing across our hub and see what areas we could improve on. It will also be good to look at our inquiry topics this year and see what we can integrate with texts sets that can be useful to all of us.
Thanks for reading.
