Week 1 Term 3 2013

This week has been really busy settling back into the routine and making sure everything is organised. On Monday I had two new students join the class, both year 5 which takes the number up to 22.

Maths this week has been quite messy, I have set up some learning games for the children to play and this took up a day which is fine because it saves mucking around in the long run. Maths is my main focus area this term and I am really looking at my teaching and whether I am effectively teaching all children. 

I have found it really hard to plan and then teach a unit when I haven’t done it before and at the moment I have found I am trialing a lot of things to see what works for me and my students. This term I am teaching fractions, place value and measurement. The children are also focusing on mastering their times tables and I have set up a wall challenge in the class to encourage this.

Next Monday my Tutor teacher and I are visiting Korakonui Primary School to observe how maths is taught and run in their school. Will update on Monday as to what I see.

Our Daily 5 has gone ok this week. What really annoys me though is when the children know what to do but they just muck around. I spent Monday going over what is expected during Daily 5 time and the rules that our class has in place. The two new students were paired up with another student from their group and will continue to be for the next two-three weeks while they learn how the programme works.

With my guided reading groups we are focusing on summarising for the next 4-5 weeks and so far they are all doing really well.

I am still not happy with my word work area and am planning on adding more engaging activities into it over the term to give children the variety.

A fun word work activity station I set up in the holidays.

Over the holidays I spent time changing my display and am pleased with how it has turned out.

 

Our new Daily 5/CAFE display.

For the next 5 weeks in writing the class are focusing on getting their punctuation correct. I introduced the expectation around this on Monday and we will continue to build on it each week. We have a ladder that their names moves down depending on whether they have achieved the punctuation.

I set the children up for success by doing teacher modelling and then having them identify where and why punctuation has been used in a correct piece of writing (I put chn in mixed ability group for this) and they responded really well to this. They were then required to write their own sentence using the correct punctuation – I got some good pieces and some that need more guidance.

We began inquiry this week with the hook in. For this I wrote the names of heroes that I knew most chn would know onto stickers and then stick them on their heads. Their challenge was then to guess them by asking yes/no questions with most of them just telling each other who was on theirs. As a class we then had a discussion about what these people had in common. You can see this on our wiki. Children have come up with their own question that they want to find out about heroes which we have grouped and will begin researching next week.

I have started doing Early Words with two of my students and so far so good however I am yet to get the time in which I take it down to 5 minutes. This week we started Phonics in the two junior classes and its going well with the children trying hard and most are engaged. I am a bit slow at it but know I’ll get better as I do it more.

My goals for next week are:

• Be consistent with my behaviour management
• Have the timing of my programmes (maths and reading) set
• Know the content I am teaching clearly before I teach it (maths)
• Use open questions when asking the kids
• Ask children to explain their strategies before moving on
• Set children up so they know where they are going, how to get there and what to do next