Term 4 - Week 3 - What worked in this literacy inquiry?
- Small group situation.
- Opportunities to choose how to collaborate and share
- Focus on acceleration, not thinking remedial!
- Celebrating success
- The students understood what acceleration was and were excited that they were going to accelerate in their reading/writing. This engaged them in the group and motivated them to get started.
- The students felt safer sharing their ideas in the smaller group, getting the reassurance that they were correct.
- The students were part of the teaching and planning of the lessons - scribe, what can we do to meet these goals?
- Using text/exemplars at level (NZC) with scaffolds gave the students confidence in themselves to read at a higher level. High expectations, resulted in higher learning!
- The language ‘Prove it’ and ‘Justify it’ helped the students to make it a habit, to read for meaning.
- The students found reading/writing more meaningful when they had a clear purpose for their reading/writing and they had a choice in what they were reading/writing.
- The focus on making connections to prior knowledge and ideas in text in each lesson generated lots of enthusiastic discussion on each topic.
- Reinforcing known strategies using exemplars, helped to engage the students in the reading process. It helped them with their understanding of what was being read and made them enjoy reading more.
