I am extremely passionate about literacy and improving literacy levels. I am an avid reader and share my love of reading with my students. I own about three thousand children's books which I love to bring to school and share with my students. Due to the highly engaging and effective way I teach reading many of my student's have fallen in love with reading and I have continuously seen dramatic growth in my student's literacy results.
As a highly effective literacy teacher, I try to create links between Reading and Writing and ensure that I provide my students with a wide range of engaging, differentiated, purposeful, authentic and hands-on tasks. I cater to all of my students learning styles and their diverse learning needs and interests.
I recently taught a literacy block with a focus on inferring. I identified this need after conducting a PROBE Reading assessment on each of my students. I commenced this lesson sequence by unpacking a learning intention and developing success criteria with my students. I discussed the key vocabulary and worked with the students to develop a shared understanding of what inferring means. I also introduced a sentence stem to my students which was 'I infer... I know this because...'. I showed my students a picture and as a class we worked together to develop inferences about the image which I wrote down on the board.
After this, I gave each of my students another picture prompt and questions about that prompt which were differentiated based on my students learning needs. My students worked independently to answer the prompts about the image and during this time I read with a small group. My students then read independently for thirty minutes.
At the end of the lesson, I asked the students to reflect on their learning, share some of their answers and see if they had met the success criteria they set themselves at the start of the lesson.
I then used the same picture prompt during the Writing lesson. The writing focus was on finding synonyms for words using a thesaurus. During the whole class, explicit teaching time I again introduced the learning intention and developed success criteria for the lesson with the students. I explicitly taught and modelled how to use a thesaurus to make my writing more descriptive and livelier. I ensured that I unpacked the key vocabulary and broke each stage of finding a synonym using a thesaurus down into smaller steps.
My students then wrote about the picture prompt and applied what they had learnt during the whole class focus to their writing pieces. My students also worked on their personalised writing goals they had developed with me. During this time, I worked with some of my students who needed additional support to find synonyms to the words in their stories.
At the end of the lesson, following the whole-part-whole lesson structure my students reflected on their learning, a number of students shared their work and students provided and received feedback on their writing.
When possible, I ensure that I incorporate authentic learning activities which help to inspire my student's curiosity and love of learning.
A Writing lesson sequence I developed and delivered as a teacher at Roxburgh Homestead Primary School involved students learning about poetry. I taught the students about the different features of poetry and the effect they had in conveying the author’s message. These features included repetition, rhyming, similes, metaphors and onomatopoeia. Being aware that many of the students in my class didn’t have a strong vocabulary I incorporated the study of existing publications, focusing on observing and discussing the different words and phrases used by authors in poems and books. As part of this lesson sequence, students were involved in a volcano experiment, which was a meaningful authentic experience that aided in developing my students vocabulary as they discussed how the volcano looked using interesting adjectives. Students then used their understanding of the different features of poetry and their growing vocabulary to create shape poems about a volcano which they published using Microsoft Word. The quality of the poetry produced far surpassed my initial expectations which I’m sure was due to the time I took to immerse my students in rich oral language discussion. By providing additional assistance and differentiation to the students who required more support, all of the students were able to achieve an attainable goal, which was to write a shape poem about the volcano experience. The students then created a gallery of a number of poems they had written over the lesson sequence and shared these with the other Year Two classes.
During my Reading lessons I ensure that I unpack a learning intention with my students. I then create success criteria alongside my students regarding what they need to do to achieve success during the lesson. I explicitly teach a skill and use an appropriate mentor text to assist the students with learning the text. Students then work on differentiated tasks based on their individual learning goals. Whilst students are working on those independent or collaborative tasks I conduct a guided reading group. During my guided reading group I ensure that I have a clear focus and unpack key vocabulary with the students. I ensure that I ask my students questions which help them to practise the skill they are developing. At the end of the Reading lesson I ensure that my students reflect on their learning, determine wether they were successful at achieving the learning intention and success criteria and how they are feeling with their growing goals.
Comments