The days and weeks have
passed by so quickly that it is hard to believe what we still need to get
through this term...
At the beginning of every
term, my co teacher and I have a big change around. Mostly in terms of
how we plan and changes to the way we manage the classes learning. This
term we have made some quite big changes to the way we plan and I have to say
that it seems to be working really well. I have always used a tumble or
task board for the groups that I had for Numeracy, but because Belinda was
teaching strand, we were doing our plans completely independently. We
have decided to try it differently and do a tumble for all of the groups.
Belinda is also teaching number to her two higher groups while I am still
teaching the three lower (incl the target students). It is much easier to
organise and it puts the ownership on the students a little more as they are
able to move through tasks quicker if they want to. We have also
implemented workshops into the literacy block that run along side our self
directed learning programme. This means the children plan their day before we
start and also adds the element of time management. This of course has had it's
challenges...how do we monitor their work, their progress, where to go next?
These are all things that we will learn, try and change as we go. We currently
have a tracking system that the children fill in that links their work a
central document that the whole class can access. This way, as teachers we can
click on the child's work immediately and see if they have in fact finished and
can give live feedback/ feedforward to each individually. Yes, that is a lot of
work but in some ways it is really no different than if we were to go through
all of their books and mark each one. This is just a new way and I'm sure with
time, it will become a much more efficient way of doing things in the
classroom.
In terms of my teaching
practice, I feel that I have come along way. I feel very lucky to have a
mentor who is so incredibly passionate about all things education, but in
particular - reading. I feel like I have had some really good training and
support in this area. As a result of this there has been some encouraging
movement within my target student group. It has really shown me the importance
of every ten minutes the students have with a teacher. The target group
(of six students) were receiving a supplementary programme of 10-15 minutes a
day. This included repeated reading, buddy reading, vocabulary and
comprehension of sentences. I feel much more confident teaching reading
now than I ever have and enjoy small groups when they used to be something that
caused nerves and anxiety. Small group teaching is amazing and I much
prefer to do this now.
