Success!

My clever group of Yr 6 children all made gains this year in their reading, some quite significant! I hope they continue to make this progress next year and that they develop a love of reading!

Slides and Tasks!

I had this idea that the children would be able to use Google Docs and that I could make them a worksheet type task sheet to use in between their lessons with me, but the children had bigger and better ideas about that and encouraged me to use Slides instead!

What started out as a simple worksheet became a complex slide with links to tasks, planning and the option to add their learning goals each week.  Using images of each of the books in the series I started creating slides with links to the planning that could then be easily added to their task slides each week.  Suddenly my planning became so much easier! 

Using slides I am able to add tasks and adapt them to the groups needs and abilities as they automatically update every time I save changes.

Using the comprehension tasks from the planning I can see how each child interprets the texts and this helps me plan for their needs.

Setting up my site!

I wanted my site to be useful for everyone. My goal of it being a place the Yr6 group could easily access their tasks and save them in a shared folder was fairly straightforward to organise but then I wanted to extend the site so that my planning and activities could be accessed by anyone wanting to use it within the school.

What grew from a shared folder and some Google slides was a place we could all access the planning for Q60 without printing off hundreds of pages of the teaching guide and class teachers having a greater awareness of both their children's progress and what they were learning!

One click on their group logo which matches their group box in my room and they can access all the books they are reading with me, see my goals for them and view their tasks.  For the younger children, it is a place to share my planning, set my goals for the groups, and be accountable. 

Feedback is vital! I had never set up a site before and I had to ask Google a lot of questions! I needed to know it worked so asked for feedback from my colleagues.  I'm sure I will continue tweaking it and adding to it but I am thrilled with how it looks and that it works!

My next post will be about setting up their slides so they could access their tasks! Wasn't as easy as I thought it would be :) 

Inquiry Focus Group

Cognitively engaging a group of older students who are struggling with reading and lack confidence when asked comprehension questions has become my inquiry focus this year.  

I have an enthusiastic group of Yr6, 10Yr old students who want desperately to do better in reading but are struggling to unlock the strategies that will make it easier.

I have been teaching Junior and Middle Primary aged children using the Quick60 programme for the past year and felt this could be the key for them.  Adapting the programme to suit older children and their learning needs was important. The set 1 books lend themselves perfectly to younger students with their small size, large font and small amount of words and short sentences.  I needed to find out if there was a set of books more suited to the older children with content that would both be interesting and challenging for them.

Set 2 of the Non Fiction set is perfect for this group, I was so impressed with how they engaged with the text! Although school wide testing had them at L17 or 7Yrs I found they struggled when tested using the Q60 testing kit and decided to start them at L15.  They had a goal, they all want to get to  L24 Silver, this was obviously a good goal to set as this would bring them to 9Yrs, just one year below their chronological age. 

I began working with the Q60 planning and very quickly established a routine that included a bit of competitive spelling testing and working on the comprehension questions as a group.  I wanted to make this part of the lesson more inline with what they were doing back in class so that my programme was consistent with the type of learning they were doing there.

This group of children have inspired me to get creative in Google and to do some learning myself! 
My next goal was setting up a site they could access so look for my next post on creating my site!