After looking at the schools New Entrant and year 1's KLST tests we realised, as a team that our students had poor oral language skills. To remedy this we joined up with the local Kindergarten to express our concerns. From these meetings we decided to introduce discovery play into our learning programme. We all take responsibility for an activity then we allow the junior children to pick an activity that they would be interested in. The children attend this activity for approximately 3 seeks then they are allowed to change. We also change the activities around termly. It is still in the infant stage but we have found the children are highly engaged, they mix socially and their oral language has improved. The 5 students in my class that were 4 or below in the the KLST test are now at 6 and above. below are some photos of the children enjoying the sand and water experience and the 'junk' session. After attending the Sir Paul Academy in Science I decided to do simple science experiments to help motivate my children into writing. Here we are making sherbet. I allowed the children to follow a simple recipe then I gave them free reign to experiment with ingredients, as you can see from the photos below we had great fun and I got lots of writing from the children. I decided a new year, new ideas. One of these ideas was a new planning template for reading. fter browsing various sights I found a one that looked amazing. It was coloured co-ordinated that matched the level of the reading books, containedvarious WALTS and lots of other useful information. During the second week I was very excited to try it out. Well, it didn't work. There was too much information and also the children were all at different levels within the groupings. I also had one group on red and yellow level books and I had to keep flicking from one planning sheet to another, it was too much and was was taking my concentration away from the students I was working with. I decided that my planning of last year worked really well, it didn't have all the fancy coloured co ordinated planning of the new model but it worked for me last year so why change it. I have reverted back to my old style planning, I feel more confident, I have more time to focus on my students which is beneficial for their learning. It is important to me that the children are activily engaged in their learning. below are a few photos of the children being actively engaged in their learning.
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AboutThis blog is a journal of my teaching and learning journey. For previous evidence see BT 2014 folder for paper evidence. Categories
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