New year and adapting a new routine in the classroom

After listening to Anaru's workshop last year, I really wanted to incorporate his idea about classroom paepae. He explained how clasroom paepae welcomes everyone in the classroom, celebrates the biculturalism, and settle down the children in the morning for learning.

For my new entrant classroom, I wanted it to be simple and easy to learn for the children. I printed out and laminated the labels that said "kaikarakia" and "kaikorero". In the morning, children might express their interests in being these roles, and I help them with the words that they said. Kaikaraki will greet to the children and start the karakia. At this moment, we are learning the karakia. I say one line and the children repeat after me. Kaikorero thanks the kaikarakia and greet to the children and the teacher and do their pepeha.

It has been really wonderful to have this ritual and everyone respects this time. When we did not do the karakia on one morning because we needed to go to the assembly, one child said "Yoshie, you forgot to do the karakia!" so this tells me that it is a part of us and our day and it also reminded me that we need to do this everyday. If we needed to go somewhere, then we will start the paepae a little bit early so we will have enough time to do this.

I am hoping that we will be able to do this without so much of my help later this term or in term 2. I would love to see our children leading the paepae.

Writing programme

Now I have children who are turning 6 who have the great letter-sound knowledge, can write many words, and construct sentences, I really wanted to provide appropriate support for them to be able to progress in writing.

There are a few things that these children are still working on such as having a finger space between words, having a full stop and writing more than 2 sentences. I has kind of started to be a bit boring as we write about our experiences, these children have been done this a lot, and I needed to do something different to encourage a different way of writing.
After reading the effective writing book, I came across a case study where a teacher read the story called "A lion in the meadow" and this led to the children writing about their mum. I thought this was a really interesting idea and something that our children can easily relate to the topic.
First I read the story, but before reading the story, I told them to think about the mother in the book, "what does she look like?" "what does she sound like?"

After reading the book, we discussed the questions that I asked them before. It was really interesting how the children shared their understanding of the character of the mother.
Then, I asked them to visualise their mum in their heads. Then, I modeled my writing about my mum. I talked about what her hair looked like, how it made me feel when she gave me a hug, and her name.
I wrote down some questions on pieces of paper for the children to reflect on like "What does she smell like?" "What does she sound like?" "what is her name?"
The children wrote their stories, and it was really fantastic to listen to their thoughts about their mum.
There are still many things that the children need to work on like the ones I mentioned earlier, but as a way to create a wonderful topic and to see a great content, this was such a great way to promote writing. I really enjoyed watching them think about how to put their own ideas and writing them down.

Supporting parents

Child A has been having a little bit of a difficult time at reading, I realised this when she started boking the book and playing with the pages as she read. Her reading was quite slow and I could not understand why she was trying to move the book so much. When I talked to our librarian, she said that it could be that the girl was trying to get her eyes to focus on the texts and maybe it could be that the texts seemed to move as she read. She suggested the child to have the eye test with an optometrist to see if there are any eye tracking or other issues.

The family confirmed that her daughter would need glasses after the eye test and was really grateful that they had found this out and could help their daughter. After she got glasses, it was amazing as she never moved the books like she used. She then explained to me that she could see the words more clearly with the glasses on but without them the words looked very small.

With the glasses on, we kept working at reading with her, but I still felt that something was not quite right as the girl would struggle to read words like "on" and  "like", the words that children would have learnt to read at the magenta level. Talking to the librarian again about the problem, she had given me some strategies to use with her. The great thing was that the girl has amazing letter-sound knowledge which helps her to read words letter by letter when she is not able to recognise a word.

Strategies that the librarian suggested was
to use a card that has an indent so that the child can focus on one word at a time when reading
to work on the sight word chart and read it every day (the recognition of the words needs to be instant)
The sight words can be practiced on different ways, we have been using windows to write on with a window marker which she really enjoys.
Her eyes are working really hard to focus so if she is getting tired at reading, a teacher/parent can read the next page so she can rest her eyes and read the page after.

I also had a time to sit with her mum to talk about these strategies so that we are doing the same things at home and school. The mum really appreciated the support that we are providing and recognises how individualised the support has been. She continues to say how the experience has been very different from the previous school that they were at and talked about the importance of play in the classroom and how happy the girl is at our school.

This all has been really positive and important to reflect on. Working as an early childhood teacher for the last 10 years, I know the importance of building relationships with whaanau. All children are different and we need to understand their unique individual needs so that we can support them. Involving parents in this case has been easy and it is wonderful that we are able to provide the same support at home and school.

Learning NZSL alphabet with children

As a part of my teaching inquiry, I have been adapting the use of New Zealand Sign Language alphabets to increase my target group's letter identification knowledge. I developed a video where I am signing the alphabet incorporating the use of big alphabet butterfly cards. I play this video everyday in the morning to watch with the children and sign together.

With the target group, they would watch this video everyday on the Ipad accessing from the QR code that I developed. Sometimes, I found it easy for the children to access it on the desktop computers as they could hear better with the headphones.

I am quite surprised about the results that the children have developed through the use of NZSL alphabet.
Here is the data result

Student Name	Start Date	Baseline Data	End Date	End Point Data	Improvement	Comments
Child A	11/6	LD- 4	10/8	LD-17 Sign-14	13
Child B	11/6	LD-9	10/8	LD-17 Sign-2	8
Child C	11/6	LD-28	10/8	LD-45 Sign-39	17
Child D	11/6	LD-5				not collected the data yet
Child E	11/6	LD- 21	10/8	LD-37 Sign-23	16

I am happy to say that there has been a significant increase in children's letter knowledge using the sign language alphabet and their actual development in letter signs. 

One of the main issues that some children face is that it is really hard to transfer this letter ID knowledge in reading or writing. I have been doing some work as a class using NZSL alphabet to emphasize how a word is made up of letters. 

When I am reading a big book of shared reading, and I see the word 'Cat', we talk about the letters C, A, and T in sign, and how the each letter makes sounds. When we put these sounds together, it makes the word 'Cat'. I think in general, there has been a better understanding on this as a classroom as after this discussion, some children go away and come back with the word they made. They are interested and are using their knowledge to explore. 

I would really like to see where it would go using this strategy in reading as well as some children find it really hard to look at the first letter of a word and sound it out. 

In writing, one of the target children has done really amazingly using the developed letter ID knowledge. The child was able to write down all the sounds he heard/sounded out and wrote a sentence on his own. This was his first time to do this. 

I really believe that there is a benefit in using the sign language alphabet. It provides visual support that children can rely on. Some of the letters of the alphabet resemble the shapes of the letters. We often talk about this. 

Using New Zealand Sign Language is beneficial for hearing children. Dr Sutherland from University of Canterbury talks about the benefits of bilingualism (spoken and visual languages) and describes its educational benefits, cognitive development, economic benefits, and growth of communities.

Our children have been learning New Zealand Sign Language since Term 1 and it has been amazing to watch them acquire a new language. The children feel really proud of using this language and understand why we use sign language. Using sign language also helps children develop their fine motor skills and planning of their movement which essentially links to cognitive development. 

Parent/Teacher conference

This time, the parent/teacher conference was done a little differently. There used to be a booking system for parents so that a time frame was chosen by the parents to see the teacher, however this time as we wanted to get more parents and families to come to the conferences with their children, the leadership team developed a more relaxing and casual approach where the parents and family members can drop by anytime they wanted during a set time frame.

When I first heard this was going to happen, I was a little anxious about how it was going to go as I was worried if many parents turned up at the same time, or if I wanted to have a private conversation with some families. We knew that this approach was very successful in the senior classrooms, so it was time to adapt it in our junior classrooms. It was important that we would give it a go.  After talking to a teacher who has done this last term helped to understand how and what I could do if say, a couple parents turned up at the same time.

I had my classroom ready with the children's writing books on the table,  and play equipment ready for the children. I was wondering how many parents will turn up, and was so surprised with a great number of parents/family members came to the parent/teacher conference. It was definitely wonderful to talk to parents who I do not talk regularly, for example, children who are on the bus or whose parents drop off their children at the gate.

I had a couple of parents turned up about the same time, but the parent really respected the space while I was talking to the other parent. I was able to have really meaningful and positive conversations with the parents and family members, it was just such a nice atmosphere. I had a few parents who talked highly about our school, and their love of multiculturalism and what we do at our school.

I had 11 families at the parent/teacher conference, and it was a really awesome turnout. Even though I was worried about a few things prior to the day, I think having it a new way really was not too bad at all, it rather attracted more family members to attend because of the tone that we set in the beginning as a very casual and relaxing conference where their children can show their parents around.

It was great learning for me as this was the second parent/teacher conference after having my own classroom, it definitely developed the relationships with the family and I got to know more about them which was really important for me. I was able to provide individual support that the children can benefit from to continue working with the children and their families.

Using Seesaw as a way to develop relationships with whaanau

Date: 22nd/July/2018 Reflection: Using Seesaw as a way to communicate and build relationships with whanau

The What? A description of the incident/experience with just enough detail to support doing your “So what?” section. Description about who, what, why, when, where

Since we have adopted the use of Seesaw, the online portfolio, the response and the interactions with the whanau have been very high and positive. As I used something similar in the previous centre I worked at, I knew that this was going to make a great change in the way we build relationships with our whanau and let them know how much I know about their children as well as the fact that parents are now able to see what the children are learning at school. For the last few months, I have been encouraging all of the families to join Seesaw so that they can see the updates on what the children are doing. I have been talking about the Seesaw in the classroom, so that the children also understand how this is used by the families. Some children ask me to take photos of their creations, and send it to their family through Seesaw. I would really like the children to be doing this independently in the future. The great thing about Seesaw is that the app is on the family member’s phone so that the parents/family members will get the notifications as soon as I post an item. Some parents comment on posts which create relationship building as some families share stories about their children and interests. Family members who do not live in Hamilton and do not get to see the children often really value Seesaw so that they feel connected in the child’s lives and what he/she is learning/playing at school.

So what? This is the sense-making section that asks you to surface general meaning, significance, your position/viewpoint: actions; emotions (pre-during-post)

I really enjoy the use of Seesaw and how I can develop deep and meaningful relationships with the whanau. As the individual post is private, this opens a way to interact and it results in both us the parties developing each other’s knowledge about the child, I think that is the most wonderful thing about using Seesaw. It is a way to enhance my relationships with our whanau. It lets the whanau know how much I know about the child, and also it becomes a great platform to share new knowledge with the whanau. For example, as we endeavour the play based learning philosophy, it is important to share the significance of the play based using examples I see in my classroom, and talk about why this is important for children’s development. It becomes a platform to get to know each other among whanau and celebrate their children’s learning together.

Now what? This section makes connections from the experience/ incident to further actions. For example, what would you do differently/the same next time? How come? What are key points, lessons to share with your colleagues, network and/or group outside the network? (idea, product, process, concept?) how will you do this?

I will keep using Seesaw and aim to get all of the families to join the Seesaw. I only have a few more families to join. My next aim is for the children to be able to use the Seesaw from the Ipads. They will need to learn the process of scanning the code, and then taking photos, putting descriptions and uploading their post. This is something I would really like to work on with the children.

Power of using visual time schedules

For the past few weeks, we have been using the visuals for time schedule  daily. Recently, in our team meeting, the team leader talked about the importance of incorporating visuals in the classroom, and how these can help our students. I found these visuals on Twinkle and the great things about these visuals are that it is versatile and has Māori translations as well. For some of the wording, I have changed to fit our classroom routines/activities such as Tākaro time, Waiata pipi, and Kōwhai Sports. 

I also made a bag made with paper and it says "Finished" on the front, so that when we finish an activity, a child can put the visual card of the activity into the 'finished' bag. 

Prior to introducing the visual time schedule, I know that some children who are able to read know what is happening during the day. Although I point to the items of the day in the morning and explain what will happen, some children who cannot read probably are not so aware of what will happen during the day, and might be a little bit hard to prepare for not knowing what will come next. 

Since the introduction of the visuals, I feel that the children are more engaged in what we are doing, and I often see children standing in front of the whiteboard discussing what will be next. Removing the visual card and putting into the 'Finished' bag are so satisfying for the children, and this also lets them know what will be coming up next. This also can prepare the children mentally and physically. The pictures are easy for children to interpret and they quickly learnt all of the visuals and are able to tell what these represent. Because I have several children whose English is their second language, I think looking at the pictures and knowing what will happen today can help them prepare and settle into their day. 

I am very happy that this has been working wonderfully, and have engaging children. Now I understand how powerful the use of visuals is as I definitely see the difference in children's engagement, behaviour, and abilities to manage their day using the visuals.