RPI Day 5: Planning a Reading Programme

 Today's session was all about planning a reading programme. 

It was great to have the reminder about why our use of sites is so important for our students learning. It brings back the purpose and has made me think about how I utilise my site for reading, and whether I could lay it out in way way that my students would get more from it. I think I may be cramming too much onto the slides rather than the site.

There were a few resources that I found today that I would like to explore more and use it in my programme. 

Epic - we currently use this and I have recently been exploring it a bit more. I thought that it was cool to see that there are texts to support different writing genres too. 

Readworks - I think this will be a really good one to replace read theory with a bit more customisation to the learning intentions we focus on. It is a bit more targeted and controlled than read theory. 

I am also keen to look at Muzify, I think it will really engage our students into thinking about their texts.

It has been good to think about our timetabling in our class. I wonder if I am trying to do too many groups each day and whether building some conferencing into the reading programme to support the independent learning task would be beneficial for task completion and supporting students to get more out of the tasks they are completing.

I am also going to look at the Mahi tracker in digital form. I liked the idea of the sparkline as I think that will be a good motivator for students to see their work completion and for me to quickly see how they are progressing with their work across the week. I was also mind-blown to learn that you can protect cells in a sheet so only the people who are shared into that particular cell or row can make changes to it. This means that the Mahi tracker can be shared but students can only tick and link things on their own row.  

   

I really liked the session on Read Like Writers, Write Like Readers. Focusing on structures within texts they are reading to support structures in writing is a powerful way to teach. The activity we did in writing our own paragraph made it feel achievable to write an effective paragraph. By starting with those question prompts, only having to think of the keywords, it made it easy to then fill in the gaps to create sentences, it also meant that when filling in the gaps the cognitive load wasn't on what was happening as much but filling out the details in sentences. It was nice to be in the position of our students, to see how they might feel. 

The things I want to try from this session are:

• Using some of the digital follow-up activities more effectively, like Epic and read works.
• look at my learning site and timetabling. Can they be use more effectley?
• introduce a digital mahi tracker
• for next term look at ways to plan mult level text sets a a team to make planning more efficient and effective.
• begin to use texts exerts as examples of effective writing with the students to integrate reading and writing more effectively. 

RPI Day 4: Guided Reading

The session about guided reading has given me lots of practical ways to support learners and direct guided reading. 

I think today's focus really helped me to think about the intention in my planning and how to get the most out of the time I have with the group.

I really liked how it brought us back to the structure of the guided reading lesson. I think this was a good reminder to keep the reading lessons structured and have a clear purpose. I think often with my groups, especially with our school focus being on extended discussion, I can get caught up in the discussion part of a lesson. I am going to be using the structure to guide my planning and to be more intentional.

I also found the approach to the lesson a useful point. I often feel that we start our lessons by introducing the learning intention but the teaching doesn't come until later so the link for the learner may not be as clear or explicit for our learners.  By considering our purpose and approach we can make the most out of the explicit teaching moments, keeping them short and concise, while still getting what we intended to out of it. It can also mean we are able to promote the enjoyment of the text and discussion without it getting lost in the 'teaching point'. 

It is important to think about your purpose and approach when activating knowledge. Make sure your questioning is specific to get out of the activation what you intend, relating to the text schema. It is easy for prior knowledge to lead off on a tangent and lose connection with the intended purpose. Even the way you pose questions can change what you get from the students. I like this example from the activity we did. The teacher asked a question about breeding programmes and still got the information about what her students know about the term breeding.

It was great total about ways to observe our reader fluency. in the senior school when students have moved from the learning to read to the reading to learn phase we often forget to observe the reading aloud of students who are reading to learn. These observations are important for us to understand their reading fluency. This section gave some good tips for observing the reading aloud. Using the recording of reading to observe will be helpful as it can be done outside of the classroom time which can help us to meet needs by focusing on what our students need. I plan to use this approach by continuing with the recording of the reading. I did like the fluency rubric too. I think it would be great to add to the slide where the students record their reading so that they can self-asses their own fluency. I also liked the point that it is Ok to use the correct or more academic terms with students (for example, intonation), we just have to teach what that means.

There were also a lot of great resources and ideas for us to use. The idea of having a play on your site for graphic organisers and teaching students to find the one they need creates independence for the students and is time-saving for us. I like the anticipation guides and use of KWL charts etc to build prior knowledge, depending on the topic and purpose they could be used prior to coming to the group session.

I am looking forward to putting these things into practice and being more intentional with my planning for guided reading. I am hoping that this can back to the teaching rather than the instructions (as Georgie said), and give my groups more time to focus on the key teaching and having those deeper extended discussions.

The Kahoot was also a great way to finish and consolidate our knowledge, even though it was a little bit stressful. I wonder if that is how some of our students feel when we give them those kinds of tasks? It was great to come second though 😂 I am not usually that competitive!