KPMG Hui #2 in Auckland with my MIT whanau

This year my project as a Manaiakalani innovative teacher is to work collaboratively with the MIT 2021 team and design a tool that helps in developing critical literacy skills in students. 

It always makes me happy to connect with my MIT colleagues, Dorothy and Matt (Manaiakalani Team). Yesterday we came together again as a team and shared our mahi and progress with regards to our projects. 

Since the last time I blogged I have been up to analysing the student voice and teacher voice I gathered in March in Term 1. Analysing the data has been really interesting in terms of noticing the trends and how similar certain trends are across classes at my school. 

Link to the teacher voice Google form

Link to the padlet I created for students to record their ideas

What I am really glad about is that we as a year 5-6 team of teachers looked at the Reading comprehension (PAT) data for Term 1. We really got to breaking the data apart, looking at each student and identifying the strengths and areas where there are big gaps. Finding out the gaps gave us an opportunity to plan for focussed teaching and to do targeted teaching of the gaps through flexible workshop groups in reading. 

The two websites I am finding highly effective to use are - ARBS website and ReadTheory website. What is really effective about the ARBS website is that it is designed by NZCER and has reading tasks ranging from level 1 of the curriculum to level 6. Since all the students in our team are in Year 5-6 we are mostly using the tasks under level 3 of the curriculum. Here is a link to the page from where you can access all the tasks not only in Reading but Writing, Maths and Science.   The students in my class are really showing high levels of engagement and progress completing reading tasks from this website. 

ReadTheory website is really good too in terms of developing comprehension skills in students. It has a wide range of reading material and texts for students and after each text the students have to answer questions or respond to the text in an engaging way through a quick quiz or interactive activities. All the students in my class are really enjoying reading from this website. If you set up your class and use a class code, you are able to see every student's progress. Students are able to set reading tasks at a level they want and challenge themselves and monitor their own learning. 

My next step is to get on with building a Google site with all the tools I am planning to design and really get the process of designing going now. 

I will keep you all posted with the process through blog posts in the coming weeks. 

Thank you for visiting my blog and if you have any questions or queries please don't hesitate to contact me. My email is- manpreetd@glentaylor.school.nz

Nga mihi nui