Student Voice

At the conclusion of the plays the students were asked some very basic questions and put their hands up. Eye closed to allow them to be honest and not just copy their mates.

Surprisingly the larger majority of student found the 5 weeks extremely difficult. On the other hand the large majority enjoyed the process and wanted to do more.

After this students were ask several more questions to blog about. Reading the responses it was pleasing to see that overall the students perceived they had improved in their oral language. Was this necessarily true........Short answer is NO! Even though they enjoyed it, were they ready to take on Broadway?? Absolutely not, but there was enough positive energy and excitement that it will be interesting to watch their improvement over the next 5 weeks. Students wanted more so they have been given the remainder of the term to put together one last performance. Surely 4.5 weeks of practice will be better than a 2 week period......... Only time will tell.

Overall however ever student took part and didn't shy away from the challenge.

Oral language through performance

An under utilised and extremely good resource are the plays in the school journals. Why?? You can search reading level, topic and amount of parts in each play. This makes planning easier.

These were used to enable students to develop their oral language skills in a realistic setting, that they had on most cases not been exposed to.

Students started with just understanding the vocabulary in the text and how it was used to tell a story. Something they have always done through guided reading!

The next stage was to learn their part, this proved very quickly to be the challenge. They had never been asked to learn lines before. Why is this important? They quickly realised learning their part in isolation was difficult but learning as a group made the "cues" easier and soon the flow came to their reciting. Listening was a skill they didn't first think they needed, but soon it was as big a part as say their lines. Another part that helped was they also needed to have an under study partner. Once they had their lines, students were tasked with thinking about the character interactions and expression of certain lines.

Once they were learnt we could go on to expression and delivery of lines. This was the fun stuff! Students experimented with anger, sarcasm, excitement etc; Something they found they never did when reading before.

This all tied together over a 2 week period, with a "show" at the end. No lighting, no props, and costumes, just voice and body to tell the story.

Vocabulary and non-fiction texts

Across the board in LS1, but especially among the lower ability readers, there seems to be a big deficit in vocabulary (in all learning areas). To alleviate the deficit this year, Grant and I are explicitly teaching new vocabulary to students and making them use it in context to strengthen the understanding.

I have also made a push in reading to read non-fiction books on a wide range of topics. Many of the topics are ones the children have never come across or talked about in detail. Coupled with explicit vocabulary teaching, I hope this will expand the children's prior knowledge and vocabulary.

To work in conjunction with the reading of non fiction texts, I have a series of tasks for students to complete after reading a text. The tasks range from simple tasks that would be used in the junior school to more complex tasks such as creating a hierarchy graph of ideas in the text.

Boosting literacy through oral language

In an effort to boost not only reading comprehension, but also the confidence to present an answer, we are increasing the amount of oral work students are doing.

We are attempting this in multiple ways including performing plays and regular oral presentations for IRL (in real life), and screen casting and FlipGrids for the online component.

Using FlipGrid and screen casting allows students to actively consolidate their thoughts and understanding through preparation to provide a well scripted exposition.

Off the cuff oral presentations and performing in front of their peers improves the confidence to communicate ideas. At the very least, presenting and performing will help desensitise students to being in front of a crowd, which in itself can be a crushing fear.

Basic Facts gaps

And here we are talking about one of the other major gaps in our students' knowledge; basic facts. How does one address a gap in knowledge caused by lack of exposure and practise at a time when homework is considered "ineffective", there is less time for parents to be involved in their children's learning, and there are much more compelling activities than in the past?

One way of addressing the gap in basic facts knowledge is to increase exposure to everyday. This is done through use of simple flash cards and randomly going through about ten or so at a time. The series of flash cards was simple enough to produce using Google Slides.

Another way I have implemented with the higher ability learners is to do a Basic Facts quiz before every lesson. Students are automatically given immediate feedback on the correct answers, so the quiz also becomes a feedback based learning tool. After everyone has finished the quiz, I also briefly go over the questions that seemed to cause problems for many of the learners.

The quiz method had rapid increase in recall ability, initially starting with many students scoring in the low teens out of twenty and now most scoring above 25 out of 30.

Phonics, decoding, and spelling

One issue we have across the board (but especially for our target learners) in LS1 is the ability to decode and pronounce new words along with spelling already known words. In an effort to alleviate this we have instigated a phonics programme.

The phonics programme is based on Yolanda Soryl's phonics professional development course Grant and I both attended. While we have both taught phonics previously Soryl's programme consolidates many of the phonics practises and concepts into a coherent course based in New Zealand accents.

After an inconsistent start, we have found a place for a phonics lesson within our unconventional schedule. Perhaps one of the most powerful practises, though, is continual exposure and practise through the days and weeks. A particularly good strategy is bringing up phonics at random points throughout the day.