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.