Dyslexia Staff Meeting

The first activity involved the staff discussing their weekend and then writing about it for 1 minute. After the minute, there was a word count. the next part of the activity was to discuss favourite take away and why you liked it for 30 seconds.  Another minute to write, but this time to write using the less dominant hand. This was a quick activity to show us the problems that children in our class have processing writing in an every day situation.

We were asked to share our feelings -
- frustrated
- too slow
- too hard
- messy
- poor quality
- distracting
- putdowns

This activity was to help us to walk in the shoes of the individuals in our school. I realise that I need to cater for my dyslexia in my class more.

What does mean for my class?
I need to enable my children with dyslexia by:

• Getting a 10 minute unassisted writing sample and then type this to have a screening as part of their file.
• Use memorized words of singing - from Production as a regular part of the week.
• Use clapping games to build memory
• Use funny rhymes to help the build spelling memory
• Use colour to help these children recognise words and ideas
• Repeat ideas
• Be patient
• Seat the child fairly near the teacher base so that I am available to help if necessary, or they can be supported by a well-motivated and sympathetic classmate.

Dyscalculic children are already spending a lot of mental energy trying to understand the maths, the last thing they need is to have to memorise the instructions at the same time.

I need to enable my children with dyscalculia by:

• Giving children own set of work to complete, which is at their level.
• Allowing extra time - even with problems they can do, dyscalculic children are much slower.
• Using written rather than verbal instructions and questions. 
• Focus on understanding (especially of quantity)
• Use concrete materials to help link mathematical symbols to quantity
• Start at a level which the child is comfortable at, so that they experience some success, and slowly move to more difficult areas
• Provide a lot of practice for new skills/concepts
• Reduce the need for memorisation, especially initially
• Ask a lot of questions to get the child engaged and thinking about their own thinking
• Make learning as active and fun as possible - a positive experience

TAI and ALiM

I have always loved everything about Maths and sometimes have not understood the difficulties people have understanding MATHS.

At the moment my Teacher Action Inquiry is on how an intervention can make a impact for the struggling mathematicians in my class. This has made me unpack what maths is, how it is taught (by myself and the school's protocols) and why don't these children "get it". These children have been failing in Maths for sometime and have been on the radar as children needing help. Of the 5 children in the intervention, 1 was part of an intervention last year.

What I first noticed of these children, was their lack of confidence and willingness to try to solve problems. Even when the problem was at their level they need more encouragement to use what they did know such as skip counting, making tidy tens and counting through 10s, 100s, 1000s. These children said out loud to me, " I can't do maths" "I don't get it" "Is the answer..." " I'm not sure, could it be.."

So how do you get children to take risks when they have always got the answer wrong? The approach needs to be about the learning not so much the answer.

• How will you find the answer? 
• What do you know and how can you use that?

I also decided that these children needed some of the fundamentals of how numbers work, what they look like and the unpacking of the language of maths. To do this I work with these children every day for an extra 15mins after lunch. They are doing the thinking and I am recording their thoughts, and materials to manipulate are used. I have used a range of number knowledge problems as well as taught them new strategies before the rest of the class (front loading) and their confidence has improved. Also at the end of the week, I teach them a game using counters, cards, dice and photocopied and laminated game boards to take home and play with their families and friends. The game reinforces the learning of the week. The children are required at the end of each session to tell me what they have learnt and how they can use the strategy or knowledge in the real world.

As part of the intervention (funded by the Ministry) parent contact is a requirement and the ALiM mentor ran a parent night to informing the parents of why their child had been chosen, what we hoped to achieve and what they could expect during the 15 weeks. I have used my class dojo to regularly inform the parents of the children's efforts and how they are progressing. Also when those parents come to class, I make an effort to reinforce the progress the child is making in maths and asking them what they have noticed.

 I have discovered that the children are now more willing to share ideas with their peers when first challenged with a new problem. They want to record their thinking and will challenge others when they think/know they are wrong. The children are often ready before myself after lunch and want to learn new maths. Also some of the other children in the class have joined in the group as they see themselves not doing as well as the selected group.

My challenge is to sustain the confidence and knowledge for these children for the rest of the year as the problems become more challenging and without the intervention. Maybe I need to set aside time for these children to come for help/ next steps when working with the normal rotations.


Here is the link to my updated Inquiry template so far. SH - 2016

Inclusion

During one of our staff meeting last term, the RTLB Advisor ran 2 workshops one on behaviour and one on revisiting the Special Needs register at our school. While doing the holiday tidy up I discovered the hand out from the power point for behaviour and some of the notes I had made, this and the CORE Education article (Quite simply included ..by Fionna Wright) that I have just read, have encouraged me the change around my room seating plan.
 

The child in my class has Simpson Golabi Behemel Syndrome - it is a rare disorder with only approximately 130 people in the world have been diagnosed. One of the side effects is that is very big for his age - very large hands, head and feet. I have also discovered that part of the disorder is a very large tongue. He is identified on the special needs register and has a computer and printer, and his very own set of tote trays for his books and pencil case.

 

He struggles to hold a pen correctly and has difficulty write on and between the lines, so his computer is essential. The student is working on his self management, being ready to learn can be a problem. He has learnt many avoidance behaviours - pencil sharpening, lost books, annoying others, reading in the corner (not at the correct time) and no completing the set task. This has all improved since the beginning of the year, still developing too.

 

Being overly large he has a chair that is build for him, I did have a desk placed to one side of the class and all his gear was located there as the power point to charge his computer was there too. But after reading the article and hand out I have rearranged the furniture so that he has his chair located within the class and his gear located near the other children's tote trays. By doing this I have created a very large space for our mat area and my teaching base is now more solid.

 

I am quite excited and looking forward to how the children react to the changes. My main aim is to create a more inclusive and a positive learning environment for all. 

Literacy Circles - Clarity In The Classrrom

This term we are working on writing and illustrating a picture book.  During reading I have been using narratives and articles from the School Journal to give the children background and scaffolding to assist their understanding how a narrative "works". The articles were about two New Zealand illustrations and what they do to illustrate - their inspiration, how their day works, what process is needed to get their drawings approved to use in books.

I can sometimes struggle to use the correct WALT - what do I want them to learn? Yes, they need to know the structure of a narrative, but what are the skills needed to identify that structure? From the PD I took part in earlier in the year with Jeff Anderson, the phrase "What do you notice about what the author has written?" - helps me to redefine this. I am asking the children to understand the author's purpose, finding the evidence within the text, using inference to understand the 'hidden message', make connections with they know, ask questions, use clues to work out unfamiliar words as well as skimming and scanning to identify the main idea. So do I need a WALT? Should it be WDYN - What do you notice? and How did you do that? Helping the children identify the skills they used is very important to improve their own understanding.

To teach reading when the children can 'decode', is all about the understanding/comprehension of the message. This can be fiction or non-fiction, the skills needed are the same and the children need to use a range of skills and strategies to fully understand what they are reading. They need to practice reading - ask questions when they don't understand and think - How can I understand this better? Good readers will use strategies confidently and without thought. How can I make my good readers more mindful of what they are doing?

I have chosen to use novels with my more able readers to motivate them to read with more intent and to extend them more with fictional genre. While discussing the progress so far with a colleague, I mentioned that one child was relying on his knowledge of the movie based on the book. She asked if I had used Literacy Circles before and she would send me the labels for the jobs to do this. So tonight I needed to do some research on what a Literacy Circle was and how it worked. I was quite excited when I realised that this just what I needed to make these children be more mindful of what they were reading and to take more ownership of their learning. So to make this work I will work with this group to teach them the skills for each role, use my guided sessions to gather them together and unpack their success.

ALL - What's working? What's not!

After today's sharing of blogs and the Team Leader's meeting, I realise that I need to make time to reflect, make changes, records those changes and try something new/different.

So to do this I will try to begin with questions.

What's working for my struggling writers?

Because I am working with them each day for guided writing (20 -25 minutes) and then an extra 45mins over 3 slots, the children are feeling much more confident.  They are now following aspects of the writing process - planning, drafting, revising and in some cases publishing.

The children are using a range of sentence starters and structures - moving away from simple sentences and adding depth to their writing. Ideas generally haven't been a problem for this group and orally their language is quite good. Now the children are stretching out the sounds they hear within words and are beginning to use tools - exemplars, essential lists and try/spell notebooks.

When the children are working in their independent writing books I have noticed some changes in the amount and the content for some of these children. The most noticeable change is their willingness to write - actually seeing themselves as writers, not as a subject.

What's not working for my struggling writers?

Mileage! I don't seem to be able to get through as much as I plan to do with this group. By the time we discuss what we are writing about, include everyone's ideas and plan, the actual writing in their books isn't being done in a timely fashion.  I need to build in some urgency - but this has been the problem for these children in the past, the pressure to get pieces of work completed.

Independently planning - As part of our experience I have recorded the words for use later, and then we have planned as a group together in our first session. generally I scribe and the children tell me their ideas, some children are asking if they can use other words in their planner.

Verbalising the learning - the children reflect and evaluate at the end of each piece. This gives them their next steps for their next writing piece. While the children are doing this, they are animated and can easily tell me what they need to work on.  I feel that when I'm not there beside them that this not at 'the front of their brain' helping them make decisions while they are writing. Could they tell someone else what their next steps are? Some, but not all!

What next?
I need to discuss with the children what 'we' can do to write within our time, more writing. What would help them? I will try to use Jeff Anderson - 5/7/10, write for 5 minutes, read and discuss your ideas/ improve it from feedback (spelling, editing) for 7 minutes, continue writing for another 10!

Encourage those who want to be independent in the planning stage to try to get the main ideas down and then to come back to the group and share. Give the graphic organiser (large copy) to pairs of children and get them to record what they want. Use sticky notes ( I do now - I scribe them) with more independence - children to write on them.

Before writing the children will be asked to share what they are working on in this session - I will write this onto the top the page for them to look at during this piece. Hopefully they will tell each other before  they start writing if I make "verbalising their next step" part of the practice!

How will I know if I'm successful?

My struggling writers will be able to tell me what their steps are, there will be more independence for the planning stage and there should be more writing.

The Importance of an Audience

Yesterday I decided to "pinch" one of the ideas for our ALL Meeting on Wednesday. It was sharing the children's writing with their parents. A wee girl in my group always has wonderful ideas but the dyslexia and handwriting skills make reading her writing a mission. So pushing the aside the surface features and writing it so you can understand her expression and ideas - I published her writing in an email to her parents and on our class weebly.

Awesome response from her Mum. She immediately emailed back and commented on the weebly.
I will make sure to capture those warm fuzzies  for each of the children in my ALL writing group.

What a simple idea for my colleague - but so effective.

ALL Team Meeting

This morning the teachers involved in the ALL intervention, all met to discuss the gems, challenges and celebrations. We are being lead by the AP who is setting us - readings, supporting our ideas, challenging our thinking and helping us to collaborate.

My first thoughts were that this was just a meeting to tick the boxes for the invention. I was pleasantly surprised to sit around the table and share what has been happening for each of us. It first started with the team reporting/sharing what resonated with us from the reading - Gail Loane "I've got something to say".  It was so fantastic that the reading appealed on so many different levels and there was much nodding around the table.

Points made - Everyone can write something
                    - The importance of good feedback (modelled and children using the learning to improve each other's writing)
                    - The children's writing is about their lives/experiences
                    - Reading aloud their writing to share ideas - deeper features over surface features
                    - Taking time to craft ideas
                    - Sharing GOOD writing and other writer's work

So after that we shared - gems, challenges and celebrations. Gems are as the name suggests - moments that needed to be captured. These ranged from using sticky notes to sequence ideas, parking the planning and explicitly teaching ed endings, the children's willingness to write (these children are reluctant writers) and the use of oral language.

One teacher had used the ALL 'experience' time to send emails to the children's parents with a snapshot of what they had written with a personal note from the child. A great way to create an audience for the writing. The teacher was so impressed with the instant feedback from the parents. I need to give this idea a go, so that I have more buy in from the parents.

I shared my challenge for one child in my ALL group who has great oral language but the surface features (spelling, handwriting and lack of spaces between words) make it hard for her to read back what she has written. I realised the wealth of knowledge sitting around the table. From drawing a happy face on a finger, using handwriting cards so she can see correctly formed letters, using coloured paper and having larger lines for her to write on, were some of the ideas forthcoming.

The meeting/sharing was very empowering and has given me more enthusiasm again to do the best I can for these kids. What a journey we on together!

Using words to describe

We visited the bush last week and played "Hide and Seek". The children were excited and were able to give be some words to add to our planner. After looking through the words given I discovered a real lack of depth to their words - words like fun, nice, noisy etc.

So today I was given the opportunity to re-visit the bush and add some more words to our planner. We went outside into the bush situated along side our school again. It had been raining hard yesterday and the area was damp and rather chilly. The children were wearing mainly shorts with a sweatshirt. With the help of the Teacher Aide, we took the children blindfolded and made them stand in places on their own where they couldn't hear each other and waited...

It was interesting, a couple of children had to look, some stroked the trees around them, some stamped the ground and some shouted. So we 'released' them and asked them to tell us how they felt, what did they hear, did they smell anything and so on. We had prompted them before hand to think about these elements before we took them on their travels.

It was like pulling teeth, they didn't have many words for cold, (like the wind was whipping through the trees and the Teacher Aide was turning blue!). Some of the children were rubbing their legs and rubbing their arms but still they could only come up with words like cold, really cold...
After getting some words out of them and it was beginning to rain we went inside to write some synonym webs for cold and scared.

After the children came back to class, I asked a colleague for some resources around words and what she used to develop the language for her children who were struggling with writing as well. As we have been given some more allowance on our photocopying budget I have gone a bit mad.

Lots of laminating tonight, hopefully it will help tomorrow when we make more synonym web for describing words for out Hide and Seek writing.

Reading about Visual Dyslexia

The Visual Dyslexia Solution

Inquiry - How do I help my struggling writers?

 I have selected 8 children  to work with using the ALL programme. This is a programme where the children are exposed to guided teaching for a period of at least 170 minutes - 200 minutes per week. This will happen for 15 weeks with the expectation that the children will move a year's progress - A JUMP START. The children are exposed to more oral language, scaffolding, any assistance that the Teacher deems they need.

So, after selecting 6 children with advice and knowing that 2 others are on the fringe and would benefit with extra support, I have 8 children in my ALL group. The selected children were given an e-asTTLe writing test - this was a cold sample, a picture cue and time for brainstorming and then writing for 40 minutes and 5 minutes editing. The expectation was the children would write a piece of descriptive writing. Of these selected children 3 are diagnosed with dyslexia, one who wears rose-coloured glasses to help her with visual dyslexia.

As part of the preparation for ALL - the children were all surveyed to find out how they feel about writing and how the feel about being taught writing.

The children are given a special book - a science book where the left hand page is blank and the right hand page is lined like normal. The blank page is for gluing in planning, graphic organisers, stretching and chunking words and practising writing a sentence. The book is set out with a learning goal sheet, Essential spelling lists 1-7 and success criteria for writing. I call the group my writing club.

I have struggled to plan for these children as I want them to have some input as to what to write about. So I started my first session with them today. I first showed them their books, asked them what they what to write about. The children came up with ANZAC (as the classroom is full of ANZAC, as it is our topic study), holidays, dolphins, fantasy & futuristic stories, and animals. I have created a list to use and guide the children. I began talking about animals - Pets and I found out that all the children in the group all have a pet of some sort. Mostly cats and dogs as well as a horse.

This has become my starting point as I want to develop the children's ability to describe when writing and it is always good to start with something they're familiar with. As I needed to work with the rest of the class on deconstruction of the new genre, I sent the writing club group away with a fat strip of paper and the expectation they would write one sentence about their pet.

Tonight I wrote out their sentence using Comic Sans font and the children can use this as the starting sentence for the piece of descriptive writing. Tomorrow together we will plan using a main ideas spider graphic organiser, word banks and write what next step they need to focus on during their writing.

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