Doug Wilson - Special story about Room 14

We have been on an incredible journey this year with a fantastic NZ author we have become friendly with – Doug Wilson (the author of the Tom Hassler series).  It all started in Term 2 when we read one of his Tom Hassler stories and emailed him and told him how much we loved his story!  He then responded and answered our questions, and then came and visited us – to meet us and talk about what it was like to be an author.  He then was so inspired by meeting us and our enthusiasm for his writing that he created a novel about us!  It is a tale about us going on a school camp when an evil organisation takes over the district of Waikato and we have to save the day!  We read it as a shared story and each of us had a part to play!  We loved the story about us.  Doug then told us that he was sending it to his editor, to perfect and clarify the story.  He also check that each student had a part and were mentioned in the novel.

Today we had another email from Doug, to tell us that the special story he wrote about Room 14 has been sent to the publisher!  Woohoo, we are now waiting for a response from them, but have our fingers and toes crossed that they love it and are keen to publish it for the NZ market.  Doug has also said that if it does get published he would be happy to print 100 copies, with a fine tweak to make the school Vardon, to give to our school as a donation to use or sell how we saw fit, and with our class doing the cover art for this one off micro launch.  How exciting is that!!!!! We will now wait with baited breath to hear back from the publisher – we will let you know how we get on!

Inquiry Writing Focus - Reflection Weeks 4, 5, and 6

It has been a few weeks since i reflected on how this has been going unfortunately, time has flown by so quickly in recent weeks and i just haven’t had the chance to sit down and reflect on how my inquiry is going!  Will try and make up for this now.

Our writing programme is ticking along nicely, with our focus still being on ‘Exposition Writing.’  We have completed a second piece of writing.  The student’s first looked at an exemplar of writing on the topic ‘Kids Should be Kids’.  I then got the students to argue against this idea.  We use the ideas the author had used but did the reverse. The focus for this exposition was to include at least one rhetorical question, and to use time and text connectives.  This was pretty successful, and the students we able to do most of the planning themselves using the planning template that we used from the exemplar previously.  The only thing they are still struggling with is being able to come up with two reasons to back up their originally opinion statement.  Hopefully this will come with more practise, as I eventually want them to be able to do this themselves without me needing to spoon feed them ideas, or having to get the ideas from their classmates sharing.  We will be self assess our writing on Monday and i will give these students feedback on their completed writing.

This week the whole class will be rotating around 4 different arguments writing ideas for and against each argument as they go.  Then the class, including the inquiry group, will select the argument that most interests them to write their next exposition on.  Im hoping that this time around, the inquiry group won’t need to meet with me for as much time to create their plans, as they should have a wealth of ideas in which to use to create their plans.  The focus for the writing will be to ensure there are two clear reasons for each of our topic paragraph sentences.

Overall, i think this writing unit is going well.  The inquiry group seems to find this factual writing topic a lot easier to achieve the goal of ‘adding extra depth and detail’, and the improvement in the girls writing is greater.  When i reflect on why this is it could be because they don’t have to use their imagination as much as they had to with narrative writing.  Exposition is based on your opinion of a topic and your reasons for thinking this.

Inquiry Writing Focus - Week 3 Reflections

This week i found that things flowed even smoother during group rotations due to the students being used to the routines and structure of the lessons that we have had for the couple of weeks.  The inquiry group continued their narrative stories using the planning template they created in their books discussed in my reflection last week.  We also started our new genre focus this week exposition writing.  The whole class wrote a sample on the topic ‘all Vardon School students must now wear a uniform to school every day’.   The students then had the opportunity to assess their samples against the success criteria

These are my observations or thoughts about this group from the week:

• ·         The template the inquiry group created was useful and they could write this with little discussion and motivation from me – they could create their own ideas to add to this without as much discussion needed as the previous time. 
• ·         The template that they created didn’t have as much detail as the previous plan they did for the soccer ball story.  This could be either because the extra detail icons weren’t on their page as it was on the previous plan and/or because we didn’t spend as much time talking about their plan like we did last time.
• ·         All four students used this template structure to create a plan for the planning part of their exposition sample.  This is exactly what i wanted, for these students to have a template they felt confident using when they are required to write a sample, or a piece of writing and a template is not provided for them to use.  However . . . . this wasn’t quite the right writing genre to use this template for i.e. there’s not setting in an exposition so you don’t need to plan for it, but they’re getting the idea and giving it a go now which is awesome to see!
• ·         The boys are making good progress with experimenting with new ways to add interest with their writing and writing for longer periods of time, but the girls are still at a standstill.  They take a very long time to get started and having taken many risks at all with trying new things in their writing to add interest.  I know one of the reasons they are at a standstill is because they find it really hard to come up with ideas.  They can plan out what will happen at each point of the story (the intro, the problem, the solution and the conclusion), but find it hard to add in the bits in between to connect all these ideas together.   I think the fact they sit together could be part of the problem too as they then kind of feed off each other negative vib about being stuck and having no ideas.  It will be interesting to see how these girls fair with their writing during expositions, as being a factual piece of writing, they may find these easier to write and to add details to.
• ·         Tickled pink and grow for green is going really well, having the kids talk about their successes and justifying their reasons and really positive.

Inquiry Writing Focus - Week 2 reflections

This week was our second week with our inquiry project throughout the senior syndicate.  I found this week was a little less stressful than the previous week, i think because each of my groups has now established themselves with a piece of writing and are up and running.  My input now with each of my other groups is now less of a facilitator but more of a prompter of goals giver of feedback and feedforward so i found it a lot more manageable this week.  I enjoyed using the ‘proved it pink’ and ‘grow it green’ feedback/forward with all groups this week.  Having the students justify where and why they had ‘proved it pink’ using the success criteria was extremely satisfying and rewarding.

Meeting of the group during staff meeting this week:

This was a very productive and informative meeting this week.  We looked over each of our samples and discussed the commonalities we noticed between all of our samples – See these listed below:  

Looking over our time 1 data/samples and things that we’re finding a similar between all of our samples:

• They are not re-reading writing to check for sense
• brainstorming - not in order and hap hazard
• editing needs work
• using words and language but not for the way they are intended for - not using them to enhance their writing
• no development of setting time or place
• no explanation of what their story is about and why the events are happening
• lots of telling -  no showing - little to no adjectives
• not using dialogue or not using it correctly
• don’t know the difference between formal and informal writing
• using slang and think its awesome writing
• making sense
• endings are not always satisfactory

It was heartening to see that we all had students that had similar areas to work on.  We decided that planning was still an area of need for our students and decided to continue to make this the focus and goal for our inquiry groups.  We also decided it was important for the students to learn to plan using a template they could create themselves, rather than always relying on a teacher to provide this – as during assessments, we do not provide them with templates.  Over the next few days our student will be creating a narrative story with the same learning goal as before using a plan that ive titled with my students ‘the box plan’. 

Divide the page into 6 with the headings below:

• Setting
• characters
• problem
• solution
• ending
• powerful words

We all decided that the next focus for writing would be picture prompts - 3 pictures to choose from, but each teacher will select what is best for their group.  http://writingprompts.tumblr.com/page/55

 My students found this plan easy to use and i was pleased with what they came up with.  Our lessons followed the same structured lessons as the first rotation, and children are due for teacher feedback after Monday’s session.  Completion of this story is due Wednesday.  We will then be completing samples for our new writing focus which is ‘exposition’ on Thursday.  Exposition writing is to help tie in with speeches, which are happening this term. 

 Thoughts for the week ahead:

I am interested to see how we will cover some of the writing needs for our students during ‘exposition’ writing, I haven’t sat down and thought it through yet, but some of the learning needs may be hard to cover off during a writing genre such as this.  However as with all learning needs, teachers find a way to cover what is required with the time and the focus they have, so we will see how we go!

Inquiry Writing Focus - Week 1 reflections

This week we started our inquiry project throughout the senior syndicate.  We started the inquiry by gathering data on these students we thought we would have in our inquiry group, but also asked the whole class to complete the sample in case the children we thought we would be using for the group weren’t actually the ones we most needed to target.  Based on what the four students i had previously thought would be the best for my inquiry had produced in the sample, i am happy to work with these four.  See my notes in the post below to see what they can do successfully, and my ideas for the things i think they need to master in order to be able to create writing that has more depth and detail – effectively pushing them from a good level 2 to at least a basic level 3 writer. 

My plan was to meet with my group for the last four sessions of the week – each day building on the previous day, and building on the WALT I had decided for the group which was ‘to add depth and description to my writing’.  Boy was it a struggle!  I found that the way i had structured my 45minute writing session just couldn’t realistically fit in a warm up and two group rotations.  My focus of course this term is for the inquiry group which i have called the ‘personifications’, but even planning to have 15 minutes with them just doesn’t feel anywhere near enough time to really explore the things that i feel they need to work on.  I felt so rushed and like i was motoring through all i had planned to get through, doing none of my activities any justice at all, and coming off like a bit of a grump.  I love teaching writing, and this structure felt like I was doing myself and my students a severe dis-service.  Something has to change.   I don’t want to focus only on the inquiry group as my other students have needs, and i am not willing to give away my warm up time as i feel that this is a time where i can do some great hotspot activities which help to achieve some of the goals students have from their reports.  So am at a bit of a cross roads.  Do i go to whole class teaching and take the personifications?  Effectively only having two groups?  But then, this would be very frustrating for my top group who don’t need step by step instructions, and need the chance to meet with me to see ways that can extend their ability that is to far advanced for the rest of the class!  What to do, what to do!!!!?????  Any ideas???  I’ve decided that now that most groups are up and writing i will trial having the separate groups for another week and then will reflect on how this goes at the end of the week.  We have one more week of narrative writing after this, so may change my approach for our Expositions writing focus.

Sweet Tweets - Restorative Practise Activity

This term I will be undertaking a ‘sweet tweet’ community circle task.  I wanted to build on the person outline task we did in term 1 in our learning logs to further strengthen our class community and to build our class culture even more.  The person outline task we did during the first weeks of this year involved us each writing a special message to each class member around their person outline in their learning logs.  This helped to break the ice, and get each of us to think about each member in our new class and appreciate what we knew about them then.  I really found this task such a powerful activity as my students were buzzing after they read all of these short messages and it really helped each student to feel welcome in the class.

This term I wanted to do something similar as we are about half way through the year, and we now know more about each other.  So I was lucky enough to purchase some ‘sweet tweet’ templates from a resource store in America and will be doing this with my class over the first 4 weeks of term.  Each student will need to choose one classmate a day to observe and think about.  Their exit pass for each day is to have written a sweet message for that classmate.  This will be recorded with their initials in the grid on the cube under the board.

My learning intention with this activity is:

• To notice the great things about each of the members of our class
• Show appreciation for the things that our class mates do and say
• Understand why it is important to tell other what we appreciate about them
• Feel a sense of belonging to our class community
•  Everyone getting that feel good feeling upon reading their messages from others

During our first community circle for week 1, we will be discussing this and the purpose of the task.  We will also be discussing what kinds of things we will be looking for in our class mates, (linking these into our 4R’s and TRUMP’s etc) and how we need to be specific– as i don’t want messages like ‘you are nice’ etc.  Children will be encouraged to write up ideas on paper for the board.  Come check it out in Room 14 and have a chat about how it’s going with a member of our class.

Our Class Assembly 2014

On the last day of term was our class assembly. We had a great time sharing our learning for the term about space! Watch the video below to see out performance. A big 'Thank you' to Leah's granddad for videoing this for us :)