Friday, 17 July 2015

Feeling prepared and ready to go!

I love the holidays for two reasons. One - they are a time of rest and relaxation after a crazy term and two - you end them feeling like you are on top of everything and ready to take on the world.  And what a feeling it is!!

Every teacher - and every student - could tell you about the importance of teachers being energetic and lively and how this impacts student teaching, however I can certainly say that in the last few days of an 11 week term those words are not adjectives that I would have chosen to describe myself.

Having spent the past two days in school I feel refreshed, renewed and filled with enthusiasm about the coming term.  I have changed around my planning and have been inspired to create a mini inquiry into some of my lowest students for writing - these are students who are below and not quite well below but will still need a lot of directed and individual focus to get them to where they need to be by the end of the year.  My mini inquiry is based around the question: "If I work daily with my struggling writers, instead of seeing them twice a week, will this provide them with the structured guidance that they need to have moved up a sublevel by the end of term - and to also have transferred their learning across to their independent books?"  Usually I mark writing books with the students when conferencing and then make notes about what to discuss with them from their follow up sessions.  With this group I will be conferencing with the three of them daily in a group session but then also marking their follow up with them in the afternoon and having them hand in their independent writing books each night for me to be able to see also.

I have attached as google docs some of the planning that we have done for this term  - and also my weekly timetable for the first week.  I have not yet planned my Maths as the students will be doing a pretest before the lesson - also where it says POGIL this means that the students have their own sheets of activities that they work their way through - based on the focus within the teaching session and their choice of what they need to learn at that time - decided through conferences and goals.

Below are attachments that highlight what our focus will be for the first three weeks of school.

Unit Plans
As a school we don't do unit plans for reading or Maths - these are done individually as they are very particular to each class.

Class Plans

Examples of resources that go with plans

Reading
Speeches and follow up activities based on blooms for the follow people:
Bill Gates - Speech and Comprehension work
Malala Yousafzai - Speech and Comprehension work
MLK - Speech and Comprehension work
Kid President - Speech and Comprehension work
Kid President - Static text work

Writing
Explanation plan and written piece exemplars

Maths
Y6 Level Pretest

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